For most healthy adult women and men, resting heart rates range from 60 to beats per minute. However, a report from the Women's Health Initiative WHI indicated that a resting heart rate at the low end of that spectrum may offer some protection against heart attacks. If your resting heart rate is consistently above 80 beats per minute, you might want to talk to your doctor about how your heart rate and other personal factors influence your risk for cardiovascular disease.
The rate at which your heart is beating when it is working its hardest to meet your body's oxygen needs is your maximum heart rate. Your maximum heart rate plays a major role in setting your aerobic capacity—the amount of oxygen you are able to consume. Several large observational studies have indicated that a high aerobic capacity is associated with a lower risk of heart attack and death.
And a small controlled trial demonstrated that men and women with mild cognitive impairment who raised their aerobic capacity also improved their performance on tests of memory and reasoning.
Vigorous exercise is the best way to both lower your resting heart rate and increase your maximum heart rate and aerobic capacity. Because it's impossible to maintain a maximum heart rate for more than a few minutes, physiologists have advised setting a percentage of your maximum heart rate as a target during exercise.
However, if you don't exercise regularly, you should check with your doctor before you set a target heart rate. Some medications—particularly beta blockers—can lower your heart rate. Your doctor can help you set realistic goals. Although you may be able to feel your blood pumping in a number of places—your neck, the inside of your elbow, and even the top of your foot—your wrist is probably the most convenient and reliable place to get a good pulse. Press your index and middle fingers together on your wrist, below the fat pad of your thumb.
Feel around lightly until you detect throbbing. In: Hurst's the Heart. McGraw-Hill Education; Mancusi C, et al. Higher pulse pressure and risk for cardiovascular events in patients with essential hypertension: The Campania Salute Network. European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.
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During readings, you want to be in a resting position with your legs uncrossed. Which measure is more important? This depends on your health, too. For patients with atrial fibrillation , heart rate might be more important to watch, but many other heart diseases depend more on blood pressure. To be safe, measure both.
True: In a large study of people going for a health checkup in China, those who had a high-normal resting heart rate of 80 bpm to 90 BPM had a 40 percent shorter lifespan than those with a desirable heart rate of 60 BPM to 69 BPM.
However, the good news is that 15 minutes to 30 minutes of daily moderate exercise, such as brisk walking, could eliminate the increased mortality and reverse the life-span loss, the researchers say. The study underlines the important role that physical activity can play in keeping your heart healthy — and giving you a longer life, Dr.
How much do you know about your blood pressure and heart rate? Zusman adds. Arrhythmias can be an emergency situation or harmless, according to the American Heart Association , making it important to get it checked out. A weak pulse found only in one part of the body suggests blood vessel blockage.
The weak pulse in one leg or arm can be compared with the pulse in the corresponding body part on the opposite side, Dr. Narrowed arteries in the heart can cause pain — known as angina — and arrhythmias. In the neck's carotid arteries, too much plaque can starve the brain, leading to stroke symptoms of weakness and paralysis on one side, says NHLBI.
Atherosclerosis can give rise to pain and numbness in the arms and legs and make the kidneys slowly fail. Clots can grow on the arterial plaques, break off and float through the bloodstream to the brain, causing a stroke, explains NHLBI , or to the heart, resulting in a heart attack, the institute says.
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