Adam’s journal
Not long ago, I was standing on the sidelines of one of my children’s many sporting events, when a friend asked me — honest, I didn’t bring it up — about my running.
Now, there are few things I’m happier to talk about than my running (just ask my ex-wife). But as we were discussing my weekly regimen, a look of concern crossed my friend’s face. “Can your heart really stand all that running?”
The question caught me by surprise.
Running is supposed to be good for you, right?
I mean, it is a way of promoting better cardiovascular health, isn’t it?
I stammered something about how regular, vigorous aerobic activity has been shown to have many long-term benefits for the heart and many other aspects of a person’s health. But I was pretty much talking through my hat.
It has always seemed to me that the benefits of running and other aerobic activities must outweigh their detriments. But is there any evidence to back this up?
Dr. Prescott prescribes
For more than two decades, a group of researchers at Stanford University has been studying whether, as a group, runners are healthier, the same or less healthy than nonrunners.
The researchers have used a “longitudinal” model to do this. That is, in 1984, they assembled two groups of subjects, then continued to study them in the years that followed.
The first group was made up of 654 runners 50 and older. The second so-called control group was made up of a similar number of Stanford University faculty and staff with demographic characteristics similar to their running counterparts.
As the study participants have aged, an interesting trend has emerged.
Dr. Eliza Chakravarty — who visited the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation earlier this month to give a talk — and her colleagues found that the older the study participants became, the more pronounced was the difference between the health of the runners and the nonrunners. Specifically, they found that after 19 years, those who didn’t run had died at more than twice the rate as the runners.
In addition, the runners showed significantly lower levels of disability than their more sedentary counterparts.
So, Chakravarty and the Stanford team concluded that vigorous exercise at your (middle) age and beyond correlates with reduced disability and a “notable survival advantage.”
There are a host of physiological reasons why this result makes sense. But I won’t bore you with them. After all, the sooner you’re done reading this, the quicker you can get your running shoes laced up.
[ask-drp]
