High Heart Rate

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Abstract
THE RESULTS of several landmark epidemiological studies carried out in diverse population settings showed cigarette smoking, high blood pressure (BP), serum cholesterol levels, and diabetes mellitus to be strongly associated with all-cause and coronary heart disease (CHD) mortality rates. In recent years, evidence has been accumulating that a high heart rate is also an important risk factor for cardiovascular and noncardiovascular death in middle-aged persons,1-3 even though its prognostic importance has been overlooked by the scientific community and is still ignored by physicians. Clarifying whether a high heart rate is a risk factor for death remains important also in the growing population of elderly persons in industrialized countries. This is of particular interest because some risk factors for atherosclerosis, such as the total cholesterol level, smoking, and obesity, tend to lose their predictive power for morbidity and death in old age.4-8 Sex differences in the effects on mortality of a potentially modifiable risk factor such as the heart rate are also important to examine.