April 13, 2015 – Treadmill Data

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Anchor lead: Treadmill stress tests analyzed a new way help physicians predict death risk, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Data from almost 60,000 treadmill stress tests have revealed a new way of assessing your risk of dying from any cause in the next ten years, a study by Haitham Ahmed, a preventive cardiologist at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues has shown.

Ahmed: We wanted to focus on relatively healthy people who’d never had a heart attack before who were referred for a treadmill stress test, so they got on a treadmill and they were exercised to their maximum capacity, and we wanted to see which exercise parameters are most predictive of ten year survival. We saw that fitness was easily the most important predictor, that was followed by the heart rate achieved.  So that along with your age and gender were able to give us very good information about your predicted ten year survival, without knowing anything else about you.   :31

The test is called the FIT Treadmill Score, and Ahmed predicts it will be widely adopted soon. He hopes people will be motivated by the score to improve their own health. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.