Stroll for health, boogie for fitness."Walking is man's best medicine," wrote Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician. It may be woman's best medicine, too. A new study shows that regular hour-long strolls -- which do little to improve cardiovascular fitness cardiovascular fitness Fitness A benchmark of a subject's cardiovascular and respiratory 'reserve', assessed by exercise testing; improved CF ↓ risk of acute MI. See Aerobic exercise, Exercise, MET, Thallium stress test, Vigorous exercise. Cf Anaerobic exercise. -- can nevertheless reduce a woman's heart disease risk by boosting her blood levels of high-density lipoproteins (HDLs), which help remove cholesterol from the body. "We found that even low levels of activity are beneficial," says study leader John J. Duncan of The Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research in Dallas. "We're telling people if the shoe fits, start walking." This is the first clinical study to show that exercise need not be vigorous to lower a person's risk of cardiovascular disease Cardiovascular disease Disease that affects the heart and blood vessels. Mentioned in: Lipoproteins Test cardiovascular disease , Duncan and his coauthors write in the Dec. 18 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association is an international peer-reviewed general medical journal, published 48 times per year by the American Medical Association. JAMA is the most widely circulated medical journal in the world. . Indeed, they say, the findings confirm epidemiologic evidence suggesting that HDL (Hardware Description Language) A language used to describe the functions of an electronic circuit for documentation, simulation or logic synthesis (or all three). Although many proprietary HDLs have been developed, Verilog and VHDL are the major standards. levels increase across a spectrum of exercise intensities. To find out how a walker's pace affects cardiovascular health, the researchers recruited 59 healthy, sedentary, premenopausal pre·me·no·paus·al adj. Of or relating to the years or the stage of life immediately before the onset of menopause. premenopausal adjective women and divided them into four groups: aerobic walkers, who exercised at 86 percent of their maximal heart rate; brisk walkers, exercising at 67 percent; strollers, exercising at 56 percent; and a sedentary control group. The three walking groups traversed 4.8 kilometers per day, five days a week. Before and after the 24-week program, the researchers measured each woman's maximum oxygen consumption--an indicator of lung capacity and cardiovascular fitness -- and assayed her blood-lipoprotein levels. While fitness increased in direct relation to walking pace, HDL levels rose the same 6 percent whether a woman strolled leisurely or "power walked," the team found. This HDL increase should slash a woman's cardiovascular disease risk by 18 percent, Duncan estimates. Peter D. Wood, who studies the health effects of exercise and diet at Stanford University's Center for Disease Prevention, cautions that the new findings don't belittle be·lit·tle tr.v. be·lit·tled, be·lit·tling, be·lit·tles 1. To represent or speak of as contemptibly small or unimportant; disparage: a person who belittled our efforts to do the job right. the value of vigorous exercise vigorous exercise A form of exercise that is intense enough to cause sweating and/or heavy breathing/ and/or ↑ heart rate to near maximum; VE is formally defined as that which requires > 6 METs; there is a graded inverse relationship between total physical . Lean, muscular athletes enjoy additional health benefits from their low percentage of body fat, he notes. "Within reason, the more exercise you do, the better," Wood says. All the same, he adds, the new data should convince people -- especially sedentary women -- that even mild activity is better than none. -- K Schmidt |
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