Associations of physical fitness and other risk factors with cardiovascular and non-violent mortality

A cohort study was conducted to examine the association between a measure of physical fitness, the average power output in watts at a target heart rate of 160 beats per minutes (AP0160), and risk of death from non-violent causes and cardiovascular disease. Longitudinal risk factor data on 2,978 Los Angeles County male firefighters were collected between 1971 and 1998. Subjects with higher APO 160 had a reduced risk of death from non-violent causes (HR = 0.60, 95% CI = (0.49, 0.74) per S.D. of watts) and cardiovascular disease (HR = 0.68, 95% CI = (0.49, 0.93) per S.D. of watts). Analysis of repeated measures of AP0160 showed that a linear change in AP0160 was negatively associated with both non-violent and cardiovascular mortality (p < 0.0001 and 0.03, respectively). Other risk factors, such as resting heart rate, were positively significantly associated with non-violent and cardiovascular mortality (both p < 0.001).