With an ever-growing stockpile of evidence demonstrating the wide-ranging health benefits of exercise, John Ioannidis, from Tufts School of Medicine (Massachusetts, USA), and colleagues completed a large-scale meta-analysis of data collected on a total of 339,274 subjects involved in 305 randomized control trials. Only in one specific aspect of cardiovascular disease—heart failure—were prescription drugs found to be clearly more beneficial than exercise. The study authors report that: “evidence on exercise interventions suggests that exercise and many drug interventions are often potentially similar in terms of their mortality benefits in the secondary prevention of coronary heart disease, rehabilitation after stroke…and prevention of diabetes.”
