All reports suggest this trend to continue well into the future. Of particular interest will be the genetic approach to disease as our understanding of the human genome progresses. M.D. Usually, you get what you pay for and occasionally what you pay for can give you more than you thought it would. For many life insurers, exercise testing has been a requirement for high-dollar policies in the older applicants. Recently, a group from the Department of Cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic published two papers studying heart rate recovery after exercise testing as a possible indicator of cardiovascular or all-cause mortality.
Exercise causes an increase in heart rate.
With the cessation of exercise, the parasympathetic system is reactivated as manifest by increased vagal tone, and the heart rate decreases. This mechanism is independent of age and the intensity of exercise. A diminished vagal tone is a known mortality marker. The autonomic nervous system and sudden cardiac death were studied to establish a post infarction risk stratification by Schwartz et al. in 1992 and further looked at in 1994 by Imai et al., who noted vagally mediated heart rate recovery was accelerated in athletes and blunted in patients with chronic heart failure. The objective of the studies was to see if reduced vagal tone, manifest by a slow heart rate recovery after exercise, was an important prognostic indicator of increased mortality.