Ticking toward trouble: long-term rise in heart rate portends death.Men whose hearts beat faster over time are likely to die earlier than those whose hearts maintain an unchanging cadence year after year, according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. a 20-year study of French police officers. But a heart with a slowing rate is likely to keep beating for the longest time. The newfound new·found adj. Recently discovered: a newfound pastime. Adj. 1. newfound - newly discovered; "his newfound aggressiveness"; "Hudson pointed his ship down the coast of the newfound sea" relationship suggests that doctors could use trends in the routine vital sign of heart rate to gauge which of their patients are in danger. Doctors have long associated a racing heart with poor health and risk of death, says Xavier R Jouven, a Paris-based electrophysiologist and epidemiologist at the Georges Pompidou European Hospital-INSERM. However, no past study has examined changes in heart rate over time, he says. Jouven and his colleagues studied 4,320 Frenchmen who were serving on the Paris police force when the study began in 1967. Participants began the study at ages 42 to 53. For the first 5 years of the study, each volunteer had a physical exam and other tests annually. Researchers kept track of the men for at least 15 additional years. As a group, the volunteers were healthy and active at the study's outset, Jouven says. Some volunteers had modest increases or decreases in their resting heart rates during the 5-year period: One-fifth of the volunteers showed a rate increase of at least seven beats per minute beats per minute Cardiac pacing The unit of measure for the frequency of heart depolarizations or contractions each minute–or pulse rate ; a similar fraction showed a decrease of that magnitude. After adjusting for changes in weight, blood pressure, blood-cholesterol concentration, and other relevant factors, the researchers found that the men whose heart rates accelerated the most over the examination period were 47 percent more likely to die during the subsequent 2 decades than were men who experienced moderate or no change. By contrast, men whose hearts slowed the most over the 5-year period were 18 percent less likely to die during the follow-up period than were men in the middle group. Jouven presented his team's findings last week at a meeting in Chicago of the American Heart Association American Heart Association (AHA), n.pr a national voluntary health agency that has the goal of increasing public and medical awareness of cardiovascular diseases and stroke, and thereby reducing the number of associated deaths and disabilities. . A rising heart rate can be "an important clue" in a variety of health problems, including not only cardiovascular disease Cardiovascular disease Disease that affects the heart and blood vessels. Mentioned in: Lipoproteins Test cardiovascular disease but also infections, anemia, and worsening pulmonary disease, comments Nieca Goldberg, a cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital Lenox Hill Hospital, on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is a 652-bed, acute care hospital and a major teaching affiliate of NYU Medical Center. Founded in 1857 as the German Dispensary, today's 10-building Lenox Hill Hospital complex has occupied its present site since 1868 when it in New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. .--B. HARDER |
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