EXERCISE COULD BE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH FOR THE HEART

Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but endurance exercise seems to make it younger. According to a study older people who did endurance exercise training for about a year ended up with metabolically much younger hearts. The researchers also showed that by one metabolic measure, women benefited more than men from the training.

"We know that the heart deteriorates as people get older, and that's largely because they don't stay as active as they used to," said one of the authors. "Past research has suggested that exercise can reverse some effects of aging, and we wanted to see what effect it would have specifically on the heart."

The researchers measured heart metabolism in sedentary older people both at rest and during administration of dobutamine, a drug that makes the heart race as if a person were exercising vigorously. At the start of the study, they found that in response to the increased energy demands produced by dobutamine, the hearts of the study subjects didn't increase their uptake of energy in the form of glucose (blood sugar).

But after endurance exercise training - which involved walking, running or cycling exercises three to five days a week for about an hour per session - the participants' hearts doubled their glucose uptake during high-energy demand, just as younger hearts do.

If heart muscle doesn't take in glucose in response to increased energy needs, it goes into an energy-deprived state, which may raise the risk of heart attack. But if it can increase glucose uptake, the heart is better protected against ischemia (low oxygen) and heart attack.

Based on heart glucose metabolism, both the men and women in the study had the same rejuvenating benefit from their exercise programs. But the heart uses both glucose and fatty acids for energy. And when the researchers looked at fatty acid metabolism, they found a striking difference in the results of exercise training between women and men. In the men, the heart's fatty acid metabolism dropped in response to increased energy demand, but it went up in women.

"By that gauge, the women had a better response to exercise training than the men," the researcher said. "At this point, the significance of that isn't clear. We know that in animal studies low fatty acid oxidation leads to heart muscle thickening and that when men train their heart muscle often gets thicker than women's. It could be that the increase in fatty acid oxidation in women's hearts with training is a reason why their hearts don't thicken as much."

Next, the research team will investigate exercise training in individuals with heart failure. "In the past heart failure patients were told to limit their activity. Now more and more we're seeing there is potentially a benefit to getting them as active as possible. We want to know if heart failure patients will experience the same benefit in heart metabolism with exercise that we saw for older people."

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Super Healthy Tip...

Isn’t it great to think that you may never be too old or perhaps even too sick to benefit from some form of regular exercise? What sort of exercise are you enjoying at the moment?