Lifetime Commitment to Exercise Benefits Heart Health

In that sedentary aging leads to decreases in performance in the heart’s left ventricular region, it has previously been observed that Masters’ athletes who train 6 or more sessions per week throughout their adult lives maintain more optimal heart muscle performance.  Paul S. Bhella, from the University of Texas – Southwestern Medical Center (USA), and colleagues studied a group of 35 healthy men (ages 65+), without chronic diseases and who were all recruited from the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study, which has prospectively documented lifelong exercise training patterns in subjects for the past 25 years.  Subjects underwent cardiopulmonary stress tests, ultrasounds of the heart and blood vessels, and other diagnostics to ascertain heart health status.  The team found that the more exercise the subjects had completed during their lives, as measured by the number of days each week they trained, the more likely they were to preserve youthful performance of the heart tissue, particularly in the left ventricular region.  The team urges that: “[I]ncreasing levels of prolonged, sustained endurance training improve diastolic function and may help to prevent heart failure in the elderly.”