"Your Life Span May Be Foretold in Your Heart Beats" - Dennis Thompson
Where your resting heart rate goes, so goes your health. That’s the suggestion of a new study that found older Swedish men with a resting heart rate of 75 beats per minute had a doubled risk of an elderly death, even though that rate is well within the normal range of 50 to 100 beats per minute. That increase in risk held for both death from any cause and death linked to heart disease. Prashant Vaishnava, MD, assistant professor of medicine and cardiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said that resting heart rate is probably an indicator of other heart risk factors. “It seems as if that’s where attention should continue to be focused rather than on resting heart rate, which can vary due to a whole slew of reasons, frankly,” said Dr. Vaishnava. "If I see a patient in that age range with a resting heart rate of 75 beats per minute, I'm not necessarily going to look at that as a risk factor, but I would continue to look at the rest of their risk factor profile."
— Prashant Vaishnava, MD, Assistant Professor, Medicine, Cardiology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Additional Coverage:U.S. News & World Report