These tests are very helpful in finding out whether a person has heart disease and in predicting who is at risk for future heart-related problems, like heart attacks. Because previous research on exercise tests has included few elderly patients, it is unclear how useful these tests are in persons 65 years of age or older. The researchers examined the results of exercise tests and determined which patients had later died or had a heart attack or heart failure. They then measured how well the exercise testing predicted these cardiac events in older patients compared with younger patients. The test results studied were workload and electrocardiographic changes.
Workload measures how long and hard a person is able to exercise during the test.
Electrocardiographic changes are abnormalities in electrical activity of the heart. Older patients could not exercise as hard as younger patients and were more likely to have abnormalities in the electrical activity of the heart during an exercise test. Workload was the only measure that predicted bad heart-related events. The relation between workload and outcome was similar in older and younger patients, even after accounting for other risk factors for heart disease such as smoking and cholesterol levels. Most of the study participants were white, and most had no symptoms of heart disease at the time of the test.