High fitness can cancel high risk, study says
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Thousands of runners fill Liberty Avenue, Downtown, as they head toward the Strip District in the Pittsburgh Marathon last month. A recent study found that middle-aged men and women who do cardiovascular exercise regularly can reduce substantially their risk of dying from heart disease.
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The very good news in a massive study recently completed by the Cooper Institute in Dallas is that middle-aged men and women who do cardiovascular exercise regularly can reduce substantially their risk of dying from heart disease.
"This is a landmark study," said Venkatramin Srinivasan, a cardiologist in the West Penn Allegheny Health System. "The important thing is the correlation of a person with high fitness and high risk factors [for heart disease, such as high blood pressure, diabetes and smoking]. If you have these risk factors, but you are fit, your risk becomes that of a person without risk factors. That's a very important point. Nobody has shown that before."
The Cooper Institute was founded in 1970 by Kenneth Cooper -- who coined the term "aerobics" -- to study the effects of exercise and diet on health.
Researchers headed by Jarett D. Berry, a cardiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, tracked 11,049 men who were examined at the Cooper Institute before 1990 until they died, or attained the age of 90.
According to this longitudinal study, there is only a 4.9 percent chance that a 55-year-old man who is very fit will die of heart disease before age 80. That compares to a 9.8 percent risk for a moderately fit middle-aged man, a 19.6 percent risk for a low-fit man, and a 28.7 percent risk for a sedentary man.
The bad news is that you have to be really, really fit to be in the top category. Cooper Institute researchers measured fitness by how long it took a test subject to run a mile on a treadmill. To be in the "very fit" category, a man has to run that mile in 8 minutes, a woman in 9 minutes.
First Published June 6, 2011 12:00 am
