Resting Heart Rate Is Not a Good Predictor of a Clustered Cardiovascular Risk Score in Adolescents: The HELENA Study

BACKGROUND: Resting heart rate (RHR) reflects sympathetic nerve activity a significant association between RHR and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality has been reported in some epidemiologic studies. METHODS: To analyze the predictive power and accuracy of RHR as a screening measure for individual and clustered cardiovascular risk in adolescents. The study comprised 769 European adolescents (376 boys) participating in the HELENA cross-sectional study (2006-2008) were included in this study. Measurements on systolic blood pressure, HOMA index, triglycerides, TC/HDL-c, VO2máx and the sum of four skinfolds were obtained, and a clustered cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk index was computed. The receiver operating characteristics curve was applied to calculate the power and accuracy of RHR to predict individual and clustered CVD risk factors. RESULTS: RHR showed low accuracy for screening CVD risk factors in both sexes (range 38.5%-54.4% in boys and 45.5%-54.3% in girls). Low specificity's (15.6%-19.7% in boys; 18.1%-20.0% in girls) were also found. Nevertheless, the sensitivities were moderate-to-high (61.4%-89.1% in boys; 72.9%-90.3% in girls). CONCLUSION: RHR is a poor predictor of individual CVD risk factors and of clustered CVD and the estimates based on RHR are not accurate. The use of RHR as an indicator of CVD risk in adolescents may produce a biased screening of cardiovascular health in both sexes.