Your goal is a relatively simple one: You want to live long and well. One of the best ways to achieve this goal is to make sure that you optimize key areas of your health, namely your metabolic and cardiovascular health.
This focus makes sense given that heart disease has been the leading cause of death in the United States for more than a century, and metabolic syndrome affects about one-third of American adults.
Dr. Sean P. Nikravan is a board-certified endocrinologist and internal medicine specialist, and he’s passionate about showing patients how to live longer and healthier. To that end, we’ve created a Longevity Program that’s designed to optimize your cardiovascular and metabolic health.
It involves tracking and improving key biomarkers, including VO₂ max, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability.
For athletes, this has long been an important measurement. To review, VO₂ max is the amount of oxygen your body can take in and make available to your muscles when you’re at full exertion.
This metric is an excellent way to figure out where your endurance stands and how well your body keeps up with your physical demands, which is why athletes track VO₂ max closely.
Our team believes that it's important for everyone to track their VO₂ max numbers because it’s one of the strongest predictors of all-cause mortality. The reality is that evaluating your VO₂ max levels gives you a clear glimpse into the state of your cardiovascular and metabolic health.
In fact, we use VO₂ max numbers to detect early cardiometabolic dysfunction before it even shows up in lab testing.
To figure out where your VO₂ max stands, you start with baseline testing — and we offer advanced VO₂ max testing using the PNOĒ system in our office. Some wearable fitness devices do track VO₂ max, but there’s a 10% margin of error, so routine lab testing is important.
Once we have your VO₂ max numbers, we look at ways to improve them, typically through targeted aerobic exercise. Not only can this work improve your performance, but raising your VO₂ max can also greatly lower your risk for heart and metabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes.
Another marker that acts as a sort of crystal ball for your health is your resting heart rate. Under normal circumstances, your heart beats about 60-100 times per minute — lower when you’re at rest and higher when you’re active.
As the name implies, your resting heart rate is the rate at which your heart is pumping blood when you’re not active. You want this number to be on the lower end, which indicates that there’s good cardiovascular fitness and more efficient heart function.
You can measure this on your own, but it’s important to get a baseline reading in a clinical setting so we have the right numbers to work with. If we find that your resting heart rate is higher than we’d like, we can work on ways to lower it so that when you’re at rest, your heart is taking a break, too.
A key biomarker for your cardiovascular, metabolic, and overall health is your heart rate variability (HRV), which describes fluctuations in the amount of time in between heartbeats.
Ideally, you want a high HRV because it means that your body can easily adapt to different circumstances and bounce back and forth between autonomic responses in your nervous system, such as:
When your HRV is higher, your body can respond quickly and, just as important, get back to normal just as quickly. This is important because you don’t want your body resting in a stress state.
Reduced HRV, on the other hand, is linked to insulin resistance, high glucose levels, and high body fat percentages, which can set the stage for serious cardiovascular and metabolic issues.
To measure your HRV, we use an electrocardiogram, which gives us a precise reading of your heart activity. Through our Longevity Program, we continue to measure your HRV to make trend-based decisions that can maximize your HRV to improve your performance and recovery and create a better balance in your nervous system.
Advanced metabolic analysis goes beyond standard medical testing and allows our team to move from guesswork to a precision-based approach to your wellness.
If you’d like to explore how tracking your cardiovascular and metabolic health through our Longevity Program can help you not only live longer, but also healthier, please contact Sean P. Nikravan, MD, in Newport Beach, California, to schedule an appointment today.
