Study Links Exercise to Healthy Arteries : Medicine: Vigorous physical training may keep the arteries flexible, researchers say. But more studies are needed to confirm it.
Exercising your blood vessel muscles may help to keep your arteries healthy as you grow older, a noted heart researcher says.
A study indicates that vigorous training may retard medial arteriosclerosis, a stiffening of the arteries that comes with age, according to Edward G. Lakatta.
Lakatta differentiates between this condition and atherosclerosis, the clogging of arteries by fatty deposits. Either can lead to high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke.
But medial arteriosclerosis, which interferes with the artery’s ability to widen as a way to reduce blood pressure, comes as muscle and elastic fiber in the artery is replaced by fibrous tissue.
“We used to think blood vessel stiffening was inevitable, but that’s why we are excited by this study,” said Lakatta, chief of the Laboratory of Cardiovascular Science at the National Institute on Aging’s Gerontology Research Center in Baltimore. Lakatta recently won a prestigious $30,000 Allied Signal Achievement Award in Aging for his contribution to biomedical research.
Lakatta and his colleagues examined 14 men ages 54-75 who ran an average of 30 miles a week. Large arteries of these endurance-trained men were compared with those of sedentary men in the same age range.
The athletes had about 30% less arterial stiffness, said the study in the American Heart Assn. journal Circulation.
In another part of the study, the researchers gave treadmill tests to 146 sedentary volunteers ages 21-96. Controlling for difference in ages, those with less stiffening of their arteries could spend more time on the treadmill.
Lakatta cautions that, although exercise might be helping people to have more supple arteries, the effect might also work the other way. People who have more supple arteries for other reasons, such as good genes, might simply be able to keep exercising when others have given up, he said.
But Lakatta leans toward the exercise explanation. Arteries might be amenable to exercise partly because the middle of the arteries includes muscle cells, Lakatta said.
Lakatta does not know the minimum level of exercise needed to get such a benefit. He wanted to find out whether a benefit exists, so he looked at very active athletes because they would be most likely to show it.
The scientific consensus is that regular moderate exercise such as walking is enough to cut risk factors.
Lakatta, recognized as both a leader in cardiovascular research and a top investigator in the field of geriatric cardiology, studies cardiac functions and how aging and cardiovascular disease modify these functions.
Other researchers agree that exercise helps to control blood pressure as people get older. But they do not think that Lakatta’s study is proof that exercise makes blood vessels dilate better.
The Lakatta study indicates a link but does not establish cause and effect, said Dr. William L. Haskell, a professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.
And wide-ranging conclusions cannot be drawn from a study of only 14 people, said Barbara V. Howard, president of Medlantic Research Institute in Washington.
To really tell, it would be better to find a large group of elderly people, train some to exercise, and then see whether they do better than people in a sedentary control group, Howard said. But, she noted, such a study could be costly.
Nonetheless, the findings fit a pattern showing that exercise can improve cardiovascular health by lowering blood pressure, improving heart function and helping the exerciser to control his weight, Howard said.
