Exercise may be as effective as medication in preventing diabetes and repeat heart attacks, and it is potentially better than medication for averting additional strokes, according to new research.
The findings, reported in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), are based on the analysis conducted by a team of researchers from London School of Economics, Harvard Medical School and Stanford University School of Medicine.
“Exercise is a potent strategy to save and extend life in coronary heart disease and other conditions,” study co-author Huseyin Nac, a fellow in pharmaceutical-policy research at Harvard Medical School, told the Wall Street Journal. “We think exercise can be considered or should be considered as a viable alternative or in combination with drug therapy.”
For this new review, researchers looked at data from 305 randomized controlled trials with 339,274 participants. The studies looked at four different health conditions: Type 2 diabetes, repeat coronary heart disease, repeat strokes and heart failure. The vast majority of the participants were put on medication, while about 14,700 were told to exercise.
They found that exercise was equally effective as drugs in keeping diabetes away and in secondary prevention of heart disease. Exercise yielded even better results than drugs for patients to recover from strokes, but drugs were more effective than exercise for treating heart failure.
The researchers noted that due to lack of sufficient evidence, the benefits of exercises on reducing mortality, is yet to be fully uncovered and brought into full action.
“Our findings reflect the bias against testing exercise interventions and highlight the changing landscape of medical research, which seems to increasingly favour drug interventions over strategies to modify lifestyle,” the researchers wrote.
“The current body of medical literature largely constricts clinicians to drug options. This blind spot in available scientific evidence prevents prescribers and their patients from understanding the clinical circumstances where drugs might provide only modest improvement but exercise could yield more profound or sustainable gains in health. The lopsided nature of modern medical research may fail to detect the most effective treatment for a given condition if that treatment is not a prescription drug.”
The authors recommended health experts to spread more awareness about the health benefits of exercises. “In cases where drug options provide only modest benefit, patients deserve to understand the relative impact that physical activity might have on their condition,” they said.
