Study Provides New Data On Heart Attacks

The way your heart speeds up when you exercise and returns to normal when you stop can predict your risk of sudden death from heart attack, even decades later, a new European study suggests. Men whose heart rate increased less than 89 beats per minute during a standard exercise test for heart patients -- called a stress test -- had six times the risk of sudden death over the next two decades, said physicians in France and Italy, who followed more than 5,700 middle-aged men for an average of 23 years. Men whose heart rate decreased less than 25 beats in the minute after they stopped the exercise test had more than double the risk of sudden death than those whose rate returned to normal faster. The findings appear in the May 12 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.