A new study found that female heart patients tend to benefit more from exercising than males.
It's no secret that exercising has many health benefits for heart patients. However, a new study found that it could be more beneficial for female heart patients than males. Physical activities reduced all-cause mortality and all-cause hospitalization risks by 26 percent in women heart patients compared to 10 percent in men with heart diseases.
"This trial was uniquely positioned to review results of exercise training in women compared with men since we included a pre-specified analysis of women, we used the largest testing database ever acquired of women and the population was optimized with medical therapy," said Ileana Piña, lead author of the study in a statement. "Heart disease has a major impact on women. Our goal is for these findings to greatly impact the management of this challenging syndrome."
The study was conducted on 2,331 patients with heart failure. Thirty five percent of them were made to take up a formal exercise program plus optimal medical therapy while the others were directed to an optimal medical therapy alone. At the start of the study, patients underwent symptom-limited cardiopulmonary exercise tests to assess exercise capacity, as measured by peak oxygen uptake (VO2).
Patients randomized to the exercise treatment group participated in supervised walking, or stationary cycling for 30 minutes three days a week for six weeks. After completing 18 sessions, patients added 40 minutes of home-based exercise two days per week. After completing 36 supervised sessions, patients were fully transitioned to a five day per week, 40 minutes a day home-based exercise program.
This study is the first to link the effects of exercise training to health outcomes in women with cardiovascular disease. One-in-four female deaths in the United States are caused due to heart diseases. Researchers of the study also found that although women are twice as likely as men to develop heart failure following heart attack or cardiac ischemia, they are less often directed to complete an exercise program.
"These findings are significant because they represent important implications for clinical practice and patient behaviors," said Dr. Piña. "Findings suggest physicians should consider exercise as a component of treatment for female patients with heart failure, as they do for male patients."
Findings of the research were published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Heart Failure. The study was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, Maryland.
