It’s generally accepted that engaging in regular physical exercise is good for your heart health on many levels. Regular exercise lowers blood pressure, helps you maintain a healthy weight, and keeps the heart muscle itself in good shape enabling it to continue to properly do its job.
Keeping fit appeared to be a bit easier in past generations. Children were able to freely walk or ride their bikes to school. Our grandmothers often walked to the corner grocery store every day for fresh fruits and meats. Television did not yet totally dominate after school hours and Nintendo, home computers, and lap tops weren’t common -- or invented.
Life today is obviously very different, revolutionized in large part because of the automobile, along with television and home computing. There’s certainly no doubt that owning an auto makes the morning commute and other everyday tasks much easier.
According to findings released as a part of the INTERHEART study, the very conveniences that make our daily commute so easy and evenings so pleasant are also responsible for increasing our risk of heart attack.
Sponsored by the World Health Organization and World Heart Federation, the INTERHEART study included approximately 29,000 participants located in 55 countries. In this controlled study, around 10,000 participants were heart attack patients with the remainder showing no signs of heart disease.
Most of the research conducted on heart disease and risk factors for heart attack are based on studies conducted in developed countries. Since there is little data to assess the impact of these risk factors on specific ethnicities, geographies, or underdeveloped countries, the INTERHEART study focused on heart attack and risk factors within such defined geographies and ethnicities to determine if all risk factors applied equally.
According to study findings, persons from low and middle income countries who owned an auto or television are at greater risk for heart attack than their less affluent counterparts who didn’t own such luxuries.
As we already know from first-hand experience in the United States, while autos make our lives more convenient, they also leave us less active. Television is another culprit that promotes a less heart healthy, more sedentary, lifestyle.
Not surprisingly, the findings confirmed that when exercise or physical activity is a daily part of your life, the risk of heart attack is reduced. Those with jobs that require mild or moderate activity enjoy a heart attack risk which is 11 percent lower than their counterparts with sedentary or desk jobs. This protective benefit to the heart only extended to mild and moderate activity and not hard manual labor.
Movement during leisure time was also found to benefit your heart and lower the risk of heart attack. Those engaging in mild exercise reduced their risk for heart attack by 13 percent.
The results for those engaging in either strenuous or moderate increased dramatically showing a 24 percent reduction in risk for heart attack. On the other hand, person owning both an auto and television were found to have an increased risk of heart attack by 27 percent!
The INTERHEART findings were consistent across all countries regardless of income. The message seems clear. If you want to reduce your risk of heart attack, get moving! To keep your heart healthy, simply look for more opportunities to get up and move.
Simple changes such as taking the stairs instead of the elevator at work, a daily walk about the building during your lunch hour, skipping a television show in the evening to play ball with your children, or turning off the television to go for a walk around the block, can make a big difference to your heart health.
Exercise is not only good for your body, it’s a relatively simple and inexpensive way to keep your heart healthy and prevent heart disease and heart attack.
Sources:
European Society of Cardiology (2012, January 11). Global study sheds light on role of exercise, cars and televisions on the risk of heart attacks. ScienceDaily. Retrieved January 17, 2012, from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120111090611.htm
Grace Rattue. Heart Attack Risk Linked To Car Ownership And Owning A TV. Medical News Today. 12 Jan 2012. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/240271.php
A Global Study of Risk Factors in Acute Myocardial Infarction. Inter-heart Study: Population Health Research Institute. 2012. http://www.phri.ca/interheart/index.htm
Reviewed January 18, 2012
by Michele Blacksberg RN
Edited by Jody Smith