The Fitbit Stat You’ve Never Heard of That May Reveal Your Real Heart Disease Risk

If you're using a FitBit, smartwatch or any other fitness tracker, you're probably checking your step count and heart rate to keep tabs on your cardiovascular health.

But while these metrics are certainly useful for tracking distance and calories burned, new research shows there may be an even more crucial number to monitor when it comes to heart disease risk—and it's probably one you've never even heard of.

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Published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the heart study analyzed health records and Fitbit data from 6,947 participants—spanning over 5.8 million days of activity and 51 billion steps. Their goal? To determine whether a new fitness metric could predict cardiovascular disease risk more accurately than step count or heart rate alone.

The Metric That May Predict Heart Disease Better Than Steps or Heart Rate

As for what that new metric even is? It’s called Daily Heart Rate Per Step (DHRPS), which is calculated by dividing your average daily heart rate by the number of steps you take. In simple terms, it shows how hard your heart is working with each step, meaning it's based more on efficiency than total effort exerted.

After analyzing how DHRPS related to major heart conditions and heart disease risk factors including high blood pressure, heart failure, stroke, heart attacks and diabetes, the researchers came to some intriguing conclusions about its relationship to cardiovascular health.

Related: How Many Steps a Day Do You Need to Lose Weight? 

Higher DHRPS Means Higher Risk

According to the findings, people whose hearts were working harder per step were more likely to have serious heart conditions like Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart failure and coronorary artery disease.

This held true even when adjusting for how many steps they took or how high their heart rate was overall.

DHRPS Outperforms Other Fitness Measures

In more surprising news, the researchers also found that DHRPS was a better predictor of heart health and risk than daily steps or heart rate alone. DHRPS also correlated more strongly with performance on exercise stress tests, which are used to measure cardiovascular fitness.

Related: Resting Heart Rate and Heart Health Connection

Why Does This Matter for Me?

Remember what I said about monitoring steps and heart rate? That's still great information to have, but based on these findings, heart health depends more on how efficiently your heart works as opposed to how hard it works over all.

Thus, calculating your DHRPS may allow for more targeted—and potentially accurate—insight into your heart health.

“It’s a measure of inefficiency,” said Zhanlin Chen, a third-year medical student at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and lead author of the new study, via The New York Times. “It looks at how badly your heart is doing. You’re just going to have to do a tiny bit of math.”

Related: Heart Rate Zones: How To Use Them to Improve Your Health

How to Calculate DHRPS (Daily Heart Rate Per Step)

Speaking of math, It has never been my strong suit. So if you're feeling confused, don't worry: I'm giving you a real life example of how to do it. Basically, you calculate DHRPS (daily heart rate per step) with the following formula: Average Daily Heart Rate ÷ Daily Step Count = DHRPS.

Let's say, on an average day, you take 6,000 steps and have an average heart rate of 90 beats per minute. To calculate DHRPS, you divide 90 by 6,000 (90 ÷ 6,000) which equals 0.015. Now imagine another person who takes 10,000 daily steps with a 90 bpm heart rate
Their DHRPS, or 90 ÷ 10,000, is 0.009.

Even though both people have the same heart rate, the second person’s DHRPS is lower, meaning their heart is more efficient per step. This is a sign of better cardiovascular fitness in this context.

“We designed this metric to be low-cost and to use data we’re already collecting,” Chen concluded. “People who want to be in charge of their own health can do a little bit of math to figure this out.”

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Sources

• "Daily Heart Rate Per Step (DHRPS): A Wearables Metric Associated with Cardiovascular Disease in a Cross‐Sectional Study of the All of Us Research Program." Journal of the American Heart Association.

• "Using a ‘Tiny Bit of Math’ May Improve Your Heart Health, Study Suggests." The New York Times.