New research suggests a link between resting heart rate and risk for violent criminality in men.

Researchers found that men with a low resting heart rate during late adolescence had a 39 percent higher chance of being convicted of violent crimes and a 25 percent higher chance of being convicted of nonviolent crimes.

The study revealed that a low resting heart rate is related to antisocial behavior in children and adolescents. It is also viewed either as an indicator of a chronically low level of psychological arousal, which may lead some people to seek stimulating experiences, or as a marker of weakened responses to aversive and stressful stimuli, which can lead to fearless behavior and risk taking.

For the study, Antti Latvala of the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm and the University of Helsinki in Finland and colleagues collected and analyzed data from more than 710,000 Swedish men born from 1958 to 1991 with up to 35.7 years of follow-up. They used their data to examine the association of resting heart rate in late adolescence to predict violent criminality later in life

The participants' resting heart rate and blood pressure were measured at mandatory military conscription testing when the men were an average age of 18 years old. There were 40,093 men convicted of a violent crime during nearly 12.9 million person-years of follow-up.

"Our results confirm that, in addition to being associated with aggressive and antisocial outcomes in childhood and adolescence, low resting heart rate increases the risk for violent and nonviolent antisocial behaviors in adulthood," the authors conclude.

The findings are detailed in JAMA Psychiatry.