You’re never too old to reap the benefits of physical exercise. This is particularly true of exercise after age 60, which a new study says may help prevent strokes and heart disease.
Seniors and exercise
A team of researchers from the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Seoul National University looked at data from 1,119,925 people who were 60 years or older to determine the benefits of exercise.
The information was collected from South Korea’s National Health Insurance Service (NHIS), which provides healthcare to almost all of the country’s population. NHIS conducted a health check in 2009-2010 and again in 2011-2012 while collecting data through 2016. With each healthcare check, the men and women were asked about their lifestyle and how much exercise they get. They used two definitions of exercise.
- Moderate physical activity included things like gardening, dancing or brisk walking for a minimum of 30 minutes daily.
- Vigorous exercise included aerobic exercise, such as running or fast cycling, for at least 20 minutes.
For both health checks, about 67% of the participants were inactive. Although men were more active than women, neither sex changed their amount of exercise much from the first health check to the second. In fact, only 22% of the group had increased their levels of activity between the two health checks. Worse still, more than half of those who had been exercising at least five times weekly were inactive by the second screening. Among participants who had decreased their exercise between screenings, the risk of cardiovascular issues increased by 27%.
The research team also looked at data related to heart disease, strokes and hospital records from 2013 through 2016.
Of the nearly 1,200,000 participants, there were 114,856 cases of stroke or heart disease reported by the end of the study. This was after adjusting for age, gender, socioeconomic status, smoking, alcohol consumption and other medical conditions.
The flip side
People who increased their exercise from only one to two times per week to five or more times per week between the health checks had lowered their risk of stroke and heart attack by 10%.
Those who went from being inactive at the first health check to moderately or vigorously active three to four times a week had decreased their risk of heart attack and stroke by 11%.
