JOIN USFor their study, the researchers collected information from 11,000 men who underwent a clinical exam and a treadmill exercise test at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas between 1970 and 1990. They found that 1,106 of them died of heart attack or stroke before 2006.
After analysing the data and taking other risk factors such as smoking habits into account, they were able to predict a man’s risk of developing heart disease based on his running time, the Daily Mail reported.
The study found a 55-year-old man who took 15 minutes to run a mile had a 30 per cent lifetime risk of dying from heart disease. In contrast, a 55-year-old who could run a mile in eight minutes had a risk of less than 10 per cent. “Heart disease tends to cluster at older ages, but if you want to prevent it, our research suggests that the prescription for prevention needs to occur earlier—when a person is in his 40s and 50s,” the study’s lead author Jarett Berry was quoted as saying.
The researchers found that a higher fitness level lowered the lifetime risk of heart disease even in people with other risk factors. The study was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.