Analyzing data from 58,000 heart stress tests, cardiologists from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore report they have developed a formula that estimates one’s risk of dying over a decade based on a person’s ability to exercise on a treadmill at an increasing speed and incline.

Several exercise-based risk scoring systems already in use are designed to measure short-term risk of dying but do so strictly for patients with established heart disease or overt signs of cardiovascular trouble.

By contrast, the new test can gauge long-term death risk in anyone based solely on treadmill exercise performance.

The score could yield valuable clues about a person’s health and should be calculated for the millions of patients who undergo cardiac stress testing.

“The notion that being in good physical shape portends lower death risk is by no means new, but we wanted to quantify that risk precisely by age, gender and fitness level, and do so with an elegantly simple equation that requires no additional fancy testing beyond the standard stress test,” says lead investigator Haitham Ahmed.

The FIT Treadmill Score is easy to calculate and costs nothing beyond the cost of the treadmill test itself.

Source: Mayo Clinic Proceedings