In a study from Baker Heart and Diabetes, scientists found that middle-aged women with a small heart have a low cardiorespiratory function (CRF).
The lower cardiorespiratory function is linked to disability, heart failure and premature death.
Studies in athletes have established a relationship between an enlarged heart and increased CRF but A/Prof La Gerche and his team have now shown that, at the other end of the spectrum, there is a clear physiologic mechanism linking a small ventricle to lower CRF.
In the current study, the team made two important and novel findings.
The first is that there is a strong positive relationship between ventricular size and CRF, and second, that there is diminished augmentation of cardiac function during exercise in those women with small cardiac size.
The team says low CRF could be partly explained by a “double hit” in which a smaller heart has a lesser capacity at rest and a lesser ability to increase the amount that it can pump during exercise.
In younger people, fitness is tested when having fun with friends. In middle-aged and older individuals, fitness defines your resilience to illness, operations and health challenges.
The team says people need to build heart muscle when they are young to have the reserve to cope with challenges when older.
hospitals are disproportionately weighted by people in whom modest illnesses push their hearts to their capacity.
Despite the limitations of having a small heart, the team says that through exercise, people can all change the size of their hearts.
For women in their middle age, one of the biggest risk factors of heart failure is fitness.
So the key message from this study should be that young and middle-aged women need to exercise to make a difference in the size of their hearts and add years to their heart health bank.
If you care about health, please read studies that hop extract could reduce belly fat in overweight people, and early time-restricted eating could help lose weight and improve blood pressure.
For more information about health, please see recent studies that Vitamin D deficiency can increase heart disease risk, and results showing Vitamin K2 could help reduce heart disease risk.
The study was conducted by Associate Professor Andre La Gerche et al and published in JACC: Cardiovascular Imaging.
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