While a low resting heart rate — anything below the average of 60 to 100 beats per minute — is usually a good measure of one’s health, a new study suggests that it might also be used to predict whether male teenagers will be violent criminals later in life, in their years as an adult.
The Swedish study, which was published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, suggests that men measured with low resting heart rates during their teenage years are more likely to commit violent crimes in their adult years.
Dr. Antti Latvala of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and the University of Helsinki in Finland, the study’s lead author, was quoted by the Daily Mail as having said that the results of the study “confirm in addition to being associated with aggressive and antisocial outcomes in childhood and adolescence, low resting heart rate increases the risk for violent and non-violent antisocial behaviours in adulthood.”
Our results confirm in addition to being associated with aggressive and antisocial outcomes in childhood and adolescence, low resting heart rate increases the risk for violent and non-violent antisocial behaviours in adulthood.
While the study’s findings might be hard to swallow, its authors noted in their published findings that a slow heart rate might increase risk-taking as a result of a reduced level of danger detection or an inclination to seek stimulating experiences.
Dr. Latvala was quoted by Reuters as having stated in an email that it’s “obvious that low resting heart rate by itself cannot be used to determine future violent or antisocial behavior,” but at the same time, it’s still intriguing how “such a simple measure can be used as an indicator of individual differences in psychophysiological processes which make up one small but integral piece of the puzzle.”
It is obvious that low resting heart rate by itself cannot be used to determine future violent or antisocial behavior (…) However, it is intriguing that such a simple measure can be used as an indicator of individual differences in psychophysiological processes which make up one small but integral piece of the puzzle.
Dr. Latvala also made a point to stress that when it comes to “the vast majority of men” with low resting heart rates, the research found that they “do not commit crimes” as adults, HealthDay News reported via Philly.com.
It is important to stress that the vast majority of men who have low resting heart rates do not commit crimes
In total, Latvala and colleagues tracked the criminal activity of over 700,000 Swedish men whose resting heart rates were recorded when they were 18-years-old. Of the more than 700,000 men analyzed by the researchers, over 40,000 were convicted later in life of a violent crime.
A study published earlier this year in the journal Pediatrics, which was conducted arbitrarily of Dr. Latvala’s, found that nearly one-third of the kids in the United States to be exposed to weapons violence before they reach the age of 18 and about 1 in every 33 is directly assaulted with either a gun or a knife in such incidences.
