 have convinced him that heart rate recovery should be added to all stress testing.
"If the heart rate recovery is not rapid enough, it's a marker of not-so-good things to come," he tells WebMD, but adds that this information needs to be seen in the bigger picture created by the other factors in testing. "If heart rate recovery is not so good, but everything else is [good], you can't put too much into it."
Fletcher adds, "Heart rate response, heart rate recovery, [blood pressure] response, [blood pressure] recovery, time on the treadmill -- all these things are very important. We can get a lot of information out of a relatively inexpensive test," he concludes.