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Chill out- you'll live longer. New research reveals that people with higher resting heart rates are significantly more likely to develop diabetes.

The latest research, which involved four year of data from 73,357 Chinese adults, revealed a positive correlation between faster heart rates and diabetes risk. Further analysis also revealed ta positive correlation between faster heart rates and disorders like impaired fasting glucose levels, which was also linked to higher risk of developing diabetes.

"In this study, we measured resting heart rate among about 100,000 Chinese adults and followed them for four years," senior study author Xiang Gao, associate professor of nutritional sciences at Penn State, said in a news release. "We found participants with faster heart rates, suggesting lower automatic function, had increased risk of diabetes, pre-diabetes, and conversion from pre-diabetes to diabetes. Each additional 10 beats per minute was associated with 23 percent increased risk of diabetes, similar to the effects of a 3 kilogram per meter square increase in body mass index," Gao added.

"We further combined our results with those of seven previously published studies including 97,653 men and women in total, on the same topic, and we found a similar association -- individuals with fast heart rate had 59 percent increased risk of diabetes relative to those with slow heart rate," he explained.

"This suggests that faster heart rate could be a novel pre-clinical marker or risk factor for diabetes," Gao concludes.

The findings are published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.