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Exercise Keeps Heart Healthy into Senior Years

Reporting from the Washington University School of Medicine, in St. Louis, Missouri, Pablo F. Soto, MD, says older hearts can work like younger hearts when training at the endurance level of physical activity.

Soto’s research team enlisted six men and six women to test the cardiovascular effect of endurance training on the aging heart.  All study participants were between 60 and 75 years of age.  All reported a sedentary lifestyle although none of the study participants was obese.  A physical trainer guided each study participant through eleven months of endurance exercise, with his or her vital statistics measured throughout the study.

Before beginning the exercise regimen, however, each study participant was tested for maximum uptake of blood sugar (glucose), a form of fuel used by the heart.  Each participant was tested at rest and again after receiving a dose of dobutamine, a substance that causes the heart to race as if engaged in vigorous exercise.  In spite of the racing of the heart, there was no correlating increase in glucose used by the heart for fuel even though it was working as hard as a heart in endurance training.

For the sake of the study, endurance exercise meant one-hour sessions of cycling, running, or walking undertaken three to five times each week.  Participants reached 65% capacity during exercise sessions during the first three months of the study.  After that, capacity was maintained at 75% during the remainder of the eleven-month study.

When uptake of glucose was measured in the study participants’ hearts after rigorous exercise, it rose as was expected, meaning the exercised hearts were performing like they did when they were younger and healthier.

The heart’s ability to process fatty acids is another measure of health that was evaluated during this study.  The surprising findings reveal a gender gap.  Fatty acid metabolism dropped when the energy demands of exercise were in play in the study’s men but went up, instead, in exercising women.

Vigorous glucose metabolism rejuvenates the energy stores of the heart and encourages metabolism of fatty acids.  Inadequate processing of the heart’s fatty acids can cause the heart muscle to thicken to an alarming degree.  When exercise is routine, however, men’s hearts respond to the exercise by becoming thicker.  The research team has suggested that the better metabolism of fatty acids found in the exercising women may be one reason women’s hearts don’t thicken as much as men’s do when engaging in routine exercise.

Full details of the study are available in the June 20 issue of the online journal, American Journal of Physiology.  The American Heart Association; the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation provided funding for this study.

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

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