United States: It is widely acknowledged that exercise is crucial for both heart and mental health, with experts noting their interconnectedness.
Exercise offers evident physical benefits. However, research has also shown a decrease in stress signals in the brain, subsequently lowering the risk of cardiovascular disease, as outlined in the study.
Learn more about the study
According to the reports, the researchers who used the data were gathered from Mass General Brigham Biobank.
For the study purpose, more than 50,000 individuals around the age of 60 were analyzed as per a study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology on Monday.
Dr. Ahmed Tawakol, a cardiologist at Mass General Hospital and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, stated, “Individuals who exercise more had a graded reduction in stress-related signals in the brain,” and “We found nice associations that exercise appeared to, in part, reduce heart disease risks by decreasing stress-related signals,” as CNN Health reported.
Furthermore, Dr. Andrew Freeman, Director of Cardiovascular Prevention and Wellness at National Jewish Health in Denver, highlighted the importance of lifestyle modifications in reducing the risk of diseases like hypertension or blood vessel diseases, stating, “These are incredibly cost effective, the magnitude of improvements are amazing — often better than many medications — and we should be putting these tools in our arsenal for ready use.”
Two-fold Increase in Exercise Benefits
Tawakol and his team aimed to determine whether individuals with more stress-related signals in the brain would benefit more from exercise.
Tawakol said, “Surprisingly, we additionally found a greater than twofold increase in benefits of exercise among individuals who are depressed versus individuals who don’t have depression or don’t have a history of depression,” as CNN Health reported.
The amount of exercise and its reduction in cardiovascular risk varied; whether a person had experienced depression played a role in that, he added.
For those without a history of depression, the expansion of heart disease reduction benefits was limited to about 300 minutes of moderate physical activity per week.
However, for individuals with depression, benefits continued to increase with the duration of exercise, according to Tawakol.