Regular Exercise Is Good for Your Heart, No Matter Your Age: Study

A study in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology found regular exercise to be beneficial for everyone with cardiovascular disease irrespective of age, reports Medical Xpress . Persons deriving the most benefit from cardiac rehabilitation were those who began with the greatest physical impairment. A total of 733 subjects completed a 25-session cardiac rehabilitation program in three cohorts — less than 65 years old, between 65 and 80, and 80 or older. After the cardiovascular intervention, all participants experienced improvements. "A few weeks of exercise training not only significantly improved exercise capacity, but also decreased anxiety and depression," said the University of Burgundy Franche-Comté's Gaëlle Deley. Participants younger than 65 who were anxious before rehabilitation had the most benefit, as did depressed participants older than 65. "A strength of this work is the examination of changes in psychosocial well-being during cardiac rehabilitation — an understudied outcome that is often highly valued by beneficiaries," noted University of Calgary Professor James A. Stone. "The work of Deley et al. may help inform strategies to augment the effects of rehabilitation, reach more people with a greater likelihood of achieving clinical benefit, and derive improved outcomes from higher value healthcare."