Want to know your risk of dying? Hop on a treadmill and start walking. Want to reduce your risk of dying? Exercise to improve your treadmill performance.
Indeed, exercise capacity - as measured by treadmill performance - is the best single predictor of mortality, better than high blood pressure, smoking, diabetes and sophisticated tests of heart function, says a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. That's true not only for people with known heart problems, but also for healthy individuals.
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The finding comes from a six-year study of more than 6 000 men, whose average age was 59, who were referred by their doctors for treadmill exercise testing. During the study, 1 256 of the men died, an average annual mortality rate of 12.9 percent.
"After adjustment for age, the peak exercise capacity, measured in metabolic equivalents (MET), was the strongest predictor of the risk of death among both normal subjects and those with cardiovascular disease," the report says. Jonathan Myers of the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Centre in California led the study.
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