Saturday, August 30, 2014

Great news, Runners!

Excerpted from Medscape (a medical news service for health professionals)

Running for even 5 to 10 minutes a day, once or twice a week, or at slow speeds was associated with substantial mortality benefits over 15 years, a prospective study showed.
Runners overall had 30% and 45% lower adjusted risks of all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality, respectively, over that period and had 3 years longer life expectancy compared with nonrunners, Duck-chul Lee, PhD, of Iowa State University in Ames, and colleagues found.
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The associations were also significant at the lowest quintiles of weekly running distance (less than 6 miles), frequency (one to two times), amount (under 506 metabolic equivalent of task or MET-minutes), and speed (less than 6 miles/hour), the group reported in the August 5 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
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The effect of “just doing something at slightly higher intensity” was profound, commented Barry Franklin, PhD, director of preventive cardiology and cardiac rehabilitation in the Beaumont Health System in Royal Oak, Mich.
“A 30% to 40% reduction in mortality -- that’s huge. That’s equivalent to the same mortality reductions we get by taking a cholesterol-lowering statin or going on a beta-blocker or taking a statin,” he told MedPage Today.
The message that some is better than none is important.....
Running is clearly better than walking for the same amount of time in terms of mortality, although walking is probably safer and easier to sustain for those starting from zero, they noted.
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"Although devising a customized exercise prescription for each patient may sound complicated, 15 minutes of brisk walking or 5 minutes of running is all it takes for most clinic patients," they wrote.
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Excerpt from 



Run for Your Life? Right!


Published: Jul 29, 2014 | Updated: Jul 30, 2014

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