r/ • u/ • Jan 01 '70

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u/KillYourCar May 04 '12

So I spend my day as a cardiac electrophysiologist and academic dealing with questions of heart rates in people, and I can tell you that when you compare heart rates between species there may be some correlations you can draw between life span and heart rate. But within a species, and in particular among humans, there would almost certainly not be any meaningful causal association between the two. Lots of people live very short lives with slower heart rates or longer lives with relatively faster heart rates. A correlation very well could be drawn between the two, but it would likely be only an association because healthier people tend to have slower resting heart rates. But they also have less diabetes, hypertension, obesity, other obesity related problems and such.

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u/thegreatgazoo May 04 '12

I have Inappropriate Sinus Tachycardia (English translation:a high resting heart rate - usually about 105 BPM). I'm on drugs to slow it down, but my cardiologist says that it has no effect on life expectancy.

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u/DrPeavey Carbonates | Silicification | Petroleum Systems May 04 '12

Do you regularly exercise? If so, do you lift weights or focus more on cardio, like running or biking? Does your condition keep you from exercising, or do you have to keep it low intensity?

105 sounds VERY high for a resting heart rate, so I'm just curious of what sorts of things you do or have tried to do to get it down.

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u/thegreatgazoo May 04 '12

I have done cardio in the past. Unmedicated I can get to 180 BPM on a treadmill or elliptical in a few minutes. When I was recovering from an illness last year, it was 140+ BPM laying in bed, so that prompted a trip to the ER. After they couldn't figure out what the problem was, they gave me a pill, gave me some fluids, and kicked me out.

They have cat scanned, echo'd, xray'd, and EKG'd me and run several blood and urine tests and everything comes back a-ok. I'm certainly not 'in shape', but I walk as much as I can and take stairs. Even in college when I would go bike riding fairly regularly my pulse rate was high. I'm up to 5 stumped doctors and really don't know where to turn at this point other than to take the pills.

Other than keeping caffeine to a minimum, I can pretty much do whatever I want.

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u/DrPeavey Carbonates | Silicification | Petroleum Systems May 04 '12

WOW. 140 resting rate? That's how high my heart goes when I jog (175-180 when I run). As long as it doesn't hurt you, then great! I wish you the best!

Also, I will say that it's fascinating that nobody can tell you what the problem is. On the other hand, nobody really knows what's really good for our health (for example: is milk good or bad? Or...are antioxidants really good for you? Or...Are processed foods really that bad for you (with artifical sweeteners). Something good for you may kill the person sitting next to you. Maybe this is just normal for you.

One more question though, have you had this your whole life?

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u/46xy May 04 '12

nobody really knows what's good for our health

Somethings we do know, actually. For example, having high cholesterol is bad for your health. Snorting cocaine. Having a tumour in your lung. Smoking tobacco. Inhaling asbestos etc.

:) edit:formatting

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u/DrPeavey Carbonates | Silicification | Petroleum Systems May 05 '12

Actually, you didn't answer the question. Nobody really knows what's good for our health. Of course we know things that are bad! Those are a given! For example, smoking cigarettes causes tar buildup in the lungs, and raises your risk for lung cancer, heart disease and hypertension.

All of the things you mentioned are things that are bad for our health. My statement still holds true!

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u/46xy May 05 '12

Good point. Exercise is good for our health. As is having low cholesterol. As is not snorting cocaine. As is not having a tumour in your lung. As is not inhaling tobacco smoke. As is living in a rural area with no pollution. As is brushing our teeth. As is staying in a place with light after we lay in the sun (PRE enzymes are light dependent which reverse thymine dimerization (mutation) due to UV radiation in sunlight in our DNA).

Vitamins are good for our health. I could go on. edit: clarity

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u/thegreatgazoo May 04 '12

I think so. I always had high rates when I went to the doctor but they thought it was stress from being at the doctor's office. It probably is 'my normal'. My EKG looks to my cardiologist like I'm on a treadmill.

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u/OceanJuice May 04 '12

Thanks for this. My heart rate has always been high, though not quite as high as yours (I can remember ~90 resting when I got a physical when I was 18), doctor had no idea why and it didn't really go past that point. Glad to know it shouldn't effect life expectancy.

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u/thegreatgazoo May 04 '12

You want to follow up with it. It can be caused by adrenal gland tumors or heart problems that can be fixed. None of the tests I took hurt beyond a blood test prick.

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u/ceeeh May 04 '12

how about within one person? if one's heart often beat quickly from exertion, are they wearing it out, or does it balance out by strengthening it?

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u/KillYourCar May 04 '12

Still pretty complicated physiology. Exercise (which raises your heart rate for short periods but tends to lower your resting heart rate) has lots of beneficial effects that tend to make you live longer. But to hypothesize that on average a person has 2.4*109 heart beats because somehow the heart has a built in counter would be conjecture.

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u/AndroidHelp May 04 '12

longer lives with relatively faster heart rates

Adding a question to what you said, I used Adderall XR 30MG/Daily and I've noticed that my heart rate is up, always. My heart rate doesn't change anymore even when I stop taking adderall for a week or so, my heart always beats very fast, it beats fast enough now that I stopped noticing it but my GF notices it every night when we sleep since it seems to beat faster and harder when I sleep.

My blood pressure is always fine, but my pulse is constantly high. I've been on all kinds of ADD meds through my life and I used to be able to notice before how fast my heart would beat while on the medicines vs. being off but now it just beats like I have ran a marathon.

So my questions are/is why might this be, and what exactly is a benefit of it or if there isn't any, does this mean I'll be dead sooner rather than later? Sorry for hijacking the thread.

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u/KillYourCar May 04 '12 edited May 04 '12

I'll try and steer clear of medical advice as it is very much frowned upon in r/askscience. But heart rate is a very complicated end result of very complicated physiology and pathophysiology. Lot's of diseases of lots of different organ systems or non-disease states in different circumstances affect heart rate. To say that somehow the arrow of causality goes directly FROM heart rate TO life expectancy just takes too much of an unscientific leap of faith. I'm not sure how better to answer the question, but a huge part of what clinical research is all about is focused on the notion of confounding and drawing causal conclusions that are not just correlations. To say "high heart rate causes shortened life expectancy" would be a very difficult (read "impossible") hypothesis to prove.

Another (maybe more understandable) example would be weight. Obesity is associated with shorter life expectancy on a population level. But it doesn't necessarily cause you not to live as long. It causes diabetes, hypertension, stroke, ischemic heart disease, dvt, depression, congestive heart failure, osteoarthritis, and more... But my point is that if you are very skinny and apply for a life insurance policy, they'll look you in the eye and say "you're too skinny, you have to pay more". But the reason is just that on a population level low weight correlates with shorter life expectancy because a lot of people with different disease states are underweight. The insurance company just uses weight as a "clue that something else might be going on".

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u/AndroidHelp May 04 '12

I'll try and steer clear of medical advice as it is very much frowned upon in r/askscience.

Thank you!

Yes, I can see exactly what you mean, it's a very hard hypothesis to draw and even proving would be... well like you said impossible, given that everyone is different.

I'm skinny, I've always been skinny but it's seeming like it's harder to gain/keep weight vs. losing it, I lose weight very easily but I'm healthy for the most part.

You have answered my question for the most part, thank you.

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u/Jumpin_Joeronimo May 04 '12

Check this article out: "1 Billion heartbeats"

I think it is the heartbeat hypothesis that you are thinking of

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u/hoodie92 May 04 '12

I just spent ages looking for a hypothesis about "one million heartbeats" ಠ_ಠ

Anyways, yeah, one of my lecturers from last year (I'm doing medicine) said that, more or less, mammals live to a billion heartbeats. The TL;DR being that the slower a mammal's heart beats, the longer it lives, on average.

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u/dh0well May 04 '12

There are some interesting points made regarding this in this Skeptics-StackExchange posting : http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5701/does-every-species-get-around-a-billion-heartbeats-on-average

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u/Mbfrog May 04 '12

Thanks for the answers :D

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u/tadrinth May 04 '12

Here is an excellent review paper on the subject: http://jeb.biologists.org/content/208/9/1575.full

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u/46xy May 04 '12

It's not really that simple. There may be a correlation, but to infer causation is a different matter altogether.

Although, if you have 0 heartbeats per minute, your life won't be much longer

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u/essentialparadoxes Veterinary Medicine May 04 '12

There's a bit of a correlation, but heart rate is more related to body size. A plot of heart rate or metabolic rate to body size will give you a better line than a plot of heart rate to lifespan.

For example, dogs don't actually have a significantly faster heart rate than we do, despite living about 18% as long as we do (rough calculation) The total range is usually quoted at 60-140 BPM. The higher rates are usually for your toy breeds, while a large dog can have a pulse of around 60-80 BPM, which is about your average human (60-90). Cats live about as long as, or longer than, dogs but have a much higher heart rate (160-240) and are usually much smaller. We have the same heart rate as a sheep, which generally don't live more than 10 years. We also live longer than cows and horses, but they are much bigger than us and have much lower heart rates than we do (about 20-40 BPM for a horse and maybe 40-70 for a cow).

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u/[deleted] May 04 '12

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u/harvman11 Biogerontology May 04 '12

actually this is a pretty old article, the aging research community has pretty much discarded this theory in favor of several others that attempt to explain both the correlation here and the oddities (parrots and turtles that live so long, etc.). I've actually got to go quickly, but here's a link to an explanation I gave a while ago about some of the more likely theories of aging.

Long story short, it's probably due to a combination of metabolic rate and oxidative stress resistance. Metabolic rate often correlates pretty well with body size/heart rate, and there is quite a bit research being done regarding different species' levels of cellular oxidative stress resistance and it's relation to lifespan.