Exercise may not stop aging, but it can counteract the muscle wasting and breakdown that accompanies growing older and heart failure, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation.
"Many physicians – and insurance companies – still believe that cardiac rehabilitation does not really help in old age,” said lead researcher Dr. Stephan Gielen, a heart specialist with the University Hospital, Martin-Luther-University of Halle, Germany. “This study clearly falsifies this belief."
For the study, Gielen and his colleagues tracked the health of 60 heart patients and 60 other healthy volunteers between 2005 and 2008. Half the participants in each age group did four weeks of supervised aerobic training or no exercise. Researchers then took muscle biopsies of all participants before and after the study.
They found that, in both groups, four training sessions of 20 minutes of aerobic exercise per day, five days a week -- plus one 60 minute group exercise session -- was associated with increased muscle endurance and oxygen uptake. The biopsies also showed people who exercised had less muscle breakdown and inflammation than those who did not.
"Exercise switches off the muscle-wasting pathways and switches on pathways involved in muscle growth, counteracting muscle loss and exercise intolerance in heart failure patients," Gielen said.
According to the American Heart Association, about 5,700,000 Americans age 20 and older have heart failure.