Slowly pull those fingers along your skin toward your body. Start at the center hollow area of the inside of your elbow with the fingers of your opposite hand. Holding your hand with your palm upward, this point is where the fleshy muscle of your thumb merges into your wrist. Just underneath your jawbone, you should be able to feel your pulse. Start at your earlobe and trace your finger along your skin straight down. You can easily feel your pulse at the following points (use your index and ring finger together and don’t press too hard): What are the different ways to feel your pulse, and why do they matter?
Depending on the place, certain points are where it’s easiest for you or a healthcare professional to feel your pulse. There are several places where the arteries are very close to your skin, some of which are easier to feel than others because of your body characteristics. That’s why each heartbeat feels like a single push rather than a constant flow of pressure like water through a hose. Between beats, your heart relaxes, which brings the pressure back down again. Your pulse is the pressure in your arteries going up briefly as your heart pushes out more blood to keep circulation going. Your pulse is how you can feel your heart rate.Įvery time your heart beats, it squeezes and propels blood through the network of arteries in your body.
Your heart rate is how fast your heart is beating at a given time. There’s a connection between your heart rate and your pulse, but they aren’t the same. Is there a difference between your heart rate and your pulse? The ability to feel your heart rate throughout your body is also a potential way for doctors to diagnose medical conditions. When your heart rate is too fast or too slow, that can be a sign of heart or other health problems. Your heart rate is an important indicator of your overall health too. That's why your heartbeat gets faster when you're active, excited or scared, and drops when you're resting, calm or comfortable. Your body automatically controls your heartbeat to match whatever you're doing or what's happening around you. Nonetheless, extant research suggests that despite this potential for over-treatment in Black populations, racial inequities in statin prescribing persist, emphasising the need for further research to investigate how differential risk estimates correlate to clinical consequences, including the effect on medication initiation, side-effect burden, and cardiovascular risk reduction in Black patients.Your heart rate is the number of times that your heart beats in a minute. Since most differences between Black versus White individuals produced higher risk estimates for Black patients, the authors hypothesise that Black patients might be more likely to be prescribed medications like statins.
Their study makes an important contribution to the literature by quantifying the potential effect of including race in ASCVD risk stratification. They reported differences in absolute cardiovascular disease risk in Black versus White individuals to be as large as 22♸% (median 6♲5%, range 0♱5–22♸) with a median relative risk of 2♴0 (range 1♰2–12♶). The authors demonstrate that race correction in the ASCVD tool creates sizable differences between Black versus White individuals in predicted 10-year risk of cardiovascular event that are “substantial and seem biologically implausible”.