Hey, veterans, Travis Studdard back here with another video on heart disability ratings
in your VA disability claim.
If you haven't seen my earlier video explaining the different symptoms that VA will be looking
at when evaluating your heart or cardiac disability, check that out and get some more information
on what the symptoms are that they'll be looking at and what you need to be focusing on when
explaining to them the severity of your condition.
What I want to talk to you now about is what types of activities are connected to those
symptoms because again, the schedule of ratings for heart disease define various activity
levels that cause these cardiac symptoms.
Again, the more active you are before you experience symptoms, the lower your rating
will be because that means the more you can do.
Conversely, if you have symptoms such as again, dizziness, fatigue, syncope, one of those
type symptoms with very mild or moderate levels of activity, that means your condition is
more severe, and you're entitled to a higher rating.
Again, less activity with symptoms, higher rating.
More activity with symptoms, lower rating.
How do we measure those levels of activity?
VA uses what the medical community uses which is MET scores.
METs which is again capital M-E-T is a scientific term which means metabolic equivalent which
again, a metabolic equivalent is essentially a measurement of energy used by the body when
performing various activities or again, in our situation here how hard your heart has
to beat and work to sustain you during activity levels from mild up to strenuous.
Again, what I want to do now is go over some activities at each level of rating to give
you an idea of how this works.
Again, the ratings are 100, 60, 30 and 10.
At the 100% level, and I've got a sheet here.
By the way, I can send you a copy of this.
If you go to WinYourVetClaim.com and go scroll down to where you can contact us with your
name and particular issue, you can fill that out, put in your email address and say that
you want to get the heart disability ratings table.
I'll shoot that over to you in an email, so you'll have a copy of this.
You can read over it and see where you may fall in terms of a rating.
Looking at the 100% level, that's a MET score of three or less.
Activities that fall in the three or less category, sleeping, that's a 0.9.
Walking at a very slow pace, what we would call a stroll, slow stroll around the neighborhood
or walking down to your mailbox, something like that would be a 2.3.
Those types of activities, if you do those, and if you're having these symptoms of fatigue,
dizziness, shortness of breath, whatever, then you probably should be rated at the 100%
level, as long as you can convince VA of that.
A 60% level, and again that's a MET score of somewhere greater than three but not greater
than five.
Walking at a little bit faster pace which say around three miles per hour, which again
the easy way to do that is on a treadmill.
That's a 3.3 MET score.
Light calisthenics, moving and bending and that sort of thing is a 3.5.
Again, this is all at the 60% level.
Just a leisurely bicycle ride, just again with the grandkids or something like that,
that's a 4.0.
Again, you're still under five, greater than three.
You're going to be right there at 60%.
Dropping down to the 30% disability rating level, that's a MET score greater than five,
and less than seven, or less than or equal to seven.
Some activities there, if you start experiencing the symptoms we talked about again of say
dizziness, for example, riding a stationary bike at fairly effort but a little bit less
leisurely as we talked about before, that's a 5.5.
Sexual activity.
Yes, this is in their rating, so we're going to talk about it here.
That's a 5.8.
I guess that could vary a little bit depending on how it goes.
That's a 5.8.
Jogging, that would be a 7.0.
That's again still less than or equal to seven.
That's going to qualify you at that 30% level.
Then dropping down to the 10% rating, again, this is where you still have some symptoms,
but you can still get out there and do some fairly vigorous activities.
Calisthenics with heavy vigorous effort, that would be an 8.0 MET score.
Running versus again a slower jog, that's an eight.
Jumping rope, that's a 10.0 MET score.
If you fall in one of those, then again yes, you have a heart disability, but it doesn't
seem to be too severe by VA standards.
You get that 10% level.
The key in your claim is explaining to them through lay and medical evidence of where
you start to experience symptoms, what physical level of activity.
You need to be able to draw that out with some examples, and then qualify for as high
of a rating as you possibly can.
Remember, these are symptoms based ratings that we're talking about here.
There are some others based on diagnosis.
We're not going to get into that in this video.
Again, this does get fairly complex.
We see VA mess these claims up routinely.
We've handled these for a number of veterans.
If you need help, reach out to us.
Again, email us, and we can email you back a copy of that list, if you'd like.
Check out our other videos.
If you found this helpful, give it a thumbs up and look forward to seeing you in some
of our others soon.