Now here's some good news for the less-athletic among us.
It turns out doctors may have been overestimating women's peak heart rates during a stress test.
Up to now, that meant a woman could hear a worse prognosis than she actually had.
The problem stemmed from the fact that peak heart rates were based on males only.
“Now we know for the first time what is normal for women, and it’s a lower peak heart rate than for men,” Martha Gulati, assistant professor of medicine and preventive medicine and a cardiologist at Northwestern Medicine, told ScienceBlog.
Gulati is the lead author of the study published in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation.
The old formula is 220 minus the participant's age. But Gulati's new recommendation for women is 206 minus 88 percent of age.
For a 55-year old woman, this would mean a difference of a heart rate of 165 (old formula) versus about 158.
“Before, many women couldn’t meet their target heart rate,” Gulati said.
“Now, with the new formula, they are actually meeting their age-defined heart rate.”
To get the new number, Gulati and colleagues studied data from nearly 5,500 women over the age of 35.
“It’s important to not get complacent that we have data on men and assume women must be the same. They’re not,” Gulati said.
She says she's working on creating an iPhone application for women to calculate their new heart rate numbers.
Image courtesy of Flickr.
Tags: Adventure Sports, Current Events, Gender, Health, Recreation and Entertainment,
comments ( )