Using smartwatches to predict future heart problems

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Smart watches and other wearables have made monitoring our fitness levels easier than ever.

Now, researchers from UCL suggest that these devices could do a lot more—they could tell you if you’re at risk for severe heart problems years in advance.

This could be life-changing news for millions of people at risk for heart failure and irregular heartbeats, also known as arrhythmia.

What Did The Researchers Do?

In the study, the researchers looked at quick heart check-ups, known as electrocardiograms (ECGs), from 83,000 people. These ECGs are the same kind that smart watches can do.

Normally, doctors use many sensors and a long test to read your heart’s electrical activity, but smartwatches make it much simpler. They use just one sensor and only take about 15 seconds.

The researchers paid close attention to extra heart beats in the ECGs. While these extra beats are often harmless, having too many of them can be a sign of future heart problems.

They found that people with an extra beat in the short recording were twice as likely to develop heart issues like heart failure or atrial fibrillation in the next 10 years.

Why Is This a Big Deal?

Heart failure and atrial fibrillation are serious health conditions. In heart failure, your heart can’t pump blood as well as it should, leaving you tired and short of breath.

Atrial fibrillation makes your heart beat irregularly and can even lead to stroke. These conditions are often hard to manage and can greatly affect your quality of life.

But what if you could know that you’re at risk long before you feel any symptoms? That’s the promise of this study.

Early warning could allow doctors to keep a closer eye on high-risk patients and give advice on lifestyle changes, like diet and exercise, to prevent these conditions.

What’s Next?

The researchers used machine learning—a type of computer program that can learn from data—to identify these extra beats quickly and accurately.

The next steps include validating these results with another set of data and exploring how best to use wearable devices for large-scale screening of heart health.

This could revolutionize how we approach heart disease.

Instead of waiting for symptoms to appear, we could be proactive and take preventive measures, lessening the burden of these severe conditions on both individuals and the healthcare system.

So the next time you check your steps or calories burned on your smartwatch, remember that these wearables could soon be saving lives by identifying heart risks long before they become critical health issues.

If you care about heart health, please read studies that vitamin K helps cut heart disease risk by a third, and a year of exercise reversed worrisome heart failure.

For more information about heart health, please see recent studies about supplements that could help prevent heart disease, stroke, and results showing this food ingredient may strongly increase heart disease death risk.

The study was published in European Heart Journal—Digital Health.

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