Watch your pulse
Increased heart rate was associated with the risk of death – and even from cancer
Alexander Berezin, Naked Science
Since the time of Ancient China, doctors have noted that an increased pulse rate indicates health problems. However, until very recently, it was unclear how big this influence is in specific figures and whether it can be used to predict possible health problems in a particular person. A new paper published in PLOS One summarized data on a large sample of UK residents and allowed us to clarify this issue.
Today, most people live in conditions of low physical activity, which seriously affects the structure of their bodies. For example, the skeletons of Stone Age people show a more developed relief on the bones, left by the muscles. Judging by him, for example, a typical Neolithic woman in physical development corresponded to a modern athlete. The situation is similar with soft tissues. Modern people have a heart of limited size, and it contracts relatively often.
It is known from sports medicine that with serious physical exertion (especially endurance), significant changes occur with a person's heart. To match the loads, it becomes larger in volume, but begins to beat less often: below 60 times per minute at rest, which are considered the lower limit of the norm for non-athletes. Apparently, such a "sporting heart" was typical for people of the past.
The authors of a new scientific paper decided to find out how heart palpitation and the risk of premature death correlate. To do this, they took data from 503,534 people from the British Biobank and tracked their mortality for nine years.
It turned out that an increase in heart rate by 10 times per minute increased the likelihood of death in men in the next nine years by 22%. It should be noted that the average age of the surveyed was 57 years. For women, a heartbeat 10 beats per minute faster than that of their peers increased the risk of death in the next nine years by 19%. The average age of the women covered by the study was 58 years.
It was somewhat unexpected that the probability of death from cardiovascular diseases turned out to be associated with a pulse rate less than with the risk of death in general. Men whose heart rate was 10 beats per minute higher than their peers died from such diseases only 17% more often over nine years of observation. Women are 14% more likely.
Moreover, for men, the excess of the pulse by 10 beats per minute over their peers correlated with an 18% increased probability of death from cancer in the next nine years. For women, such risks were equal to 15%. That is, the correlation between a rapid pulse and the probability of dying from cancer looks even slightly higher than between the pulse and death from the heart and blood vessels.
This means that a rapid pulse predicts an increased probability of death in general, and not only the risks of dying from heart and vascular diseases. But such unusual results also create a difficult question to solve. It is not entirely clear what mechanism may lie behind the correlation between a rapid pulse and an increased risk of death from cancer.
According to modern ideas, cancer cells arise in the body of every individual of our species and probably at any age. However, in a healthy person, immune cells kill cancerous ones, preventing the appearance of tumors. And a person dies from cancer when the immune system for some reason loses this ability and can no longer kill all cancer cells.
According to recent data, one of the important reasons here may be that when the level of oxytocin decreases, the human immune system weakens. Oxytocin levels are controlled by different events, so the risk of dying from cancer among Amish and traditional lifestyle peoples is two or more times lower than that of average modern people.
Perhaps there is some connection between the level of hormones that can regulate the immune system and the average heart rate at rest.
However, now the issue is very far from a high degree of study, and it is impossible to reliably understand whether such a mechanism works or not.
The authors note that the level of correlation between increased heart rate and the risk of death – from any cause, from cardiovascular diseases, and from cancer - was especially high for young people. This may mean that it is advisable for doctors to pay special attention to patients who show too high a pulse at rest.
Realizing that the chances of death for such people are tens of percent higher than those of their peers, it will be possible to carefully look for problems with their health and try to prevent illness and death.
There is no single "norm" of heart rate at rest: for athletes, it is often below 60 beats per minute without any negative health consequences, and for ordinary people - from 60 to 100.
Miguel Indurain, a five-time winner of the Tour de France cycling race, had a record low resting heart rate of 28 beats per minute. At the same time, he did not experience any problems typical for untrained people with a low pulse rate (for example, feelings of weakness) / © Wikimedia Commons.
According to the study described above, for its male participants, the average pulse rate was 68.4 beats per minute. For women – 70.3 beats per minute. According to the new work, a person with a resting pulse of about 100 beats per minute will die in the next nine years with a probability 60-70% higher than that of their peers.
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