A study of the test, involving an analysis of 58,000 heart stress tests, showed that it can estimate one's risk of dying from a heart attack or other cardiovascular condition in the next 10 years, based on a person's ability to exercise on a treadmill at an increasing speed and incline.
 

Medical Xpress reports that several exercise-based tests now measure short-term risk of dying but only in patients with heart disease or cardiovascular problems.
 

But the new test, dubbed the FIT Treadmill Score and described in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, estimates long-term death risk in anyone based solely on treadmill exercise performance.
 

The test provides clues about a person's health and should be calculated for the millions of patients who undergo cardiac stress testing in the United States each year, the researchers said.
 

"The notion that being in good physical shape portends lower death risk is by no means new, but we wanted to quantify that risk precisely by age, gender and fitness level, and do so with an elegantly simple equation that requires no additional fancy testing beyond the standard stress test," says lead investigator Haitham Ahmed, M.D., a cardiology fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.