Cardiovascular sport does more than medication

In certain diseases sports can replace medications

02/10/2013

Sport could make drugs unnecessary in certain diseases. Scientists from the London School of Economics and Political Science and Stanford University came to this conclusion. They evaluate studies in which the effectiveness of medication or sport was examined. The conclusion of the researchers: The health potential of sport has been underused so far.

Premature death from some illnesses could be avoided by sport
Many diseases could be prevented by sports. Physical inactivity is a common problem in industrial nations. Long periods of sitting at work and an unhealthy lifestyle cause many people to suffer from conditions such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. But instead of a healthy diet and exercise, some patients prefer to swallow drugs like beta-blockers. However, this is often not the best choice, as Huseyin Naci of the London School of Economics and Political Science and John Ioannidis of Stanford University in their analysis of the data of 300,000 people attested. For certain illnesses, sport better protects against premature death than medicines.

In the course of their investigation, the scientists first obtained an overview of all available clinical data on the effect of exercise on mortality. They discovered four review studies on early stages of various diseases: diabetes, coronary heart disease, heart attack and stroke. All studies except the diabetes study found that sport has a positive effect on the health of patients. The risk of dying during the study period was reduced when the participants exercised regularly.

To prevent stroke sports should be more effective than drugs
In the next step, the scientists re-searched the medical databases. This time, they wanted to examine the effect of medication on the four conditions. The evaluation showed that even medicines - except diabetes - can protect against premature death. However, the effectiveness of the funds is not always higher than that of sport. Thus, the drugs such as statins and beta-blockers were in diseases of the coronary artery in about the same sport. In case of heart failure, the effect of diuretics and in case of stroke outweighed the effect of sport.

For the first time, this meta-analysis compared the effects of sports and medications. However, it also showed that it „gives much more data on the effect of the drugs than on the effect of the movement ", the scientists report „For example, the impact of Sport on mortality from stroke only included data from 227 patients, but the effect of blood-thinning drugs was studied in more than 70,000 patients, according to the results of Naci and Ioannidis must therefore be underpinned in further investigations, yet they can only be interpreted with caution.

Efficacy of sports and medicines must be investigated in further studies
„The one-tailed, drug-focused research may lead to the most effective therapies being left unrecognized if it is not a drug treatment, "the researchers added, adding that further studies should be carried out to investigate the effects of The meta-analysis shows another weakness: not only the size of the patient groups, but also the severity of the disease could have diverged from one another to some extent and may have falsified the result.

„Although limited in their numbers, existing randomized studies on the effect of exercise suggest that exercise and many medications often have potentially similar efficacy in terms of reduced mortality in the prevention of coronary heart disease, post-stroke rehabilitation, treatment of Heart failure and diabetes prevention“, the researchers write. (Ag)