Exercise stress testing helps identify people at risk of developing coronary heart disease

Performing cardiac stress tests that measure exercise capacity and heart rate recovery can improve dramatically on existing techniques that predict who is most likely to suffer a heart attack or die from coronary heart disease (CHD), the leading cause of death in the United States, a team of cardiologists at Johns Hopkins reports.

In the Sept. 13 edition of the journal Circulation, the Hopkins team reports that 90 percent of men and women with no early signs of CHD who, nevertheless, died from it had had below average results from their cardiac stress tests conducted 10 to 20 years earlier.

Read more: Exercise stress testing helps identify people at risk of developing coronary heart disease