CHICAGO, Aug. 16 (UPI) -- Women who score less than 85 percent of their age-predicted exercise capacity are more than twice as likely to die of heart disease, U.S. researchers say.
Northwestern Medical School researcher Martha Gulati said the study, reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, is the first to establish metabolic equivalents, or METs, for women to measure their bodies' oxygen consumption at various ages.
"That's important because we've never known (the MET consumption rate) about women," Gulati told the New York Times. "Everything has been done with men, and the guidelines are very different."
The age-specific female METs came from 5,271 mainly Caucasian women who had no symptoms of heart disease when researchers began following them in 1992. It found women who scored less than 85 percent of the exercise capacity predicted for their age were 2.5 times more likely to die of cardiac disease.
Gulati recommended women get an exercise checkup and prescription from their doctor.
"If you achieve the maximum, even for a short duration, knowing that your heart can sustain it is very good news," she said.
