In a new study, researchers found that physical exercise can act prophylactically for people with metabolic syndrome and protect them against heart diseases.
Even light physical exercise has been shown to have good prophylactic effects, for both women and men.
The research was conducted by a team from the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences, GIH, and Karolinska Institutet, Sweden.
As people have adopted more sedentary lifestyles, the national body weight and waistline measurement averages have risen.
The metabolic syndrome has also grown more common, which brings with it a lowered insulin sensitivity, a disrupted blood lipid balance, and high blood pressure.
This entails a higher risk of common diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
At the end of the 1990s, one in three 60-year-olds in the Stockholm region were selected from the population registry to take part in a comprehensive health survey.
The participation rate was high, and 4,232 individuals (78%) took part.
For the study, which was designed to identify risk factors for cardiovascular diseases, participants were required to fill in detailed questionnaires about their lifestyle, report their physical exercise and undergo a physical examination and blood tests.
The incidence of the metabolic syndrome was high: 20 percent of the women and 27 percent of the men.
The participants have been monitored in Swedish registries since then, and recently a 20-year follow-up was made of the 3,693 people who were healthy at the start of the study.
During these two decades, 756 had died of various reasons, of which cases 187 were related to cardiovascular disease. A further 661 individuals had survived after developing heart disease.
The researchers found that people with metabolic syndrome who reported that they were physically active at the start of the study had a lower risk of developing or dying from heart or other diseases than people with metabolic syndrome who were sedentary.
Even light exercise was shown to be effective.
One important finding was that people with the metabolic syndrome who had reported a moderate or high rate of physical exercise had even better survival rates than those without the syndrome but with sedentary lifestyles.
The team says the finding is encouraging for several reasons. The majority of the population, particularly more senior individuals, do not get the recommended dose of physical exercise.
People with metabolic syndrome run a higher risk of disease in the future. What’s encouraging about this study is that even light exercise, which many people would be able to do, has protective effects.
One lead author of the study is Elin Ekblom-Bak.
The study is published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.
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