Middle-aged women who are physically active a few times a week are less likely to get heart disease, have a stoke, or suffer from blood clots than women who are not active. It is not necessary to exercise more often than a few times a week to lower the risk of these diseases, a new study indicates.
The study looked at women who underwent strenuous physical activity, which was enough to cause sweating and increase their heartbeat, two to three times weekly. They had about a 20 percent lower risk of heart disease, stroke, or blood clots than women who didn’t exercise at all, according to the study. More physical activity did not additionally lower their risk of those problems, the study found.
The types of physical activities the women did were walking, gardening, and cycling.
“Inactive middle-aged women should try to do some activity regularly,” says Miranda Armstrong, MPhil., PhD, the study’s lead author and a physical activity epidemiologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. “However, to prevent heart disease, stroke and blood clots, our results suggest that women don’t need to do very frequent activity as this seems to provide little additional benefit above that from moderately frequent activity.”
The study included more than a million women who had no history of cancer, heart disease, stroke, blood clots, or diabetes who were part of a study called the Million Women study, which took place in 1996-2001. The average age of participants when the study started was 56.
The women’s physical activity was recorded at the start of the study and again after three years. The researchers compared the womens’ activity levels to hospital admissions and deaths data for nine years.
According to the American Heart Association, heart disease is the number-one global cause of death in 190 countries, with 17.3 million deaths each year.
Source: Shockwave Therapy in India
