Skip to main content

Elderly with Cardiovascular Disease: Can Aerobic Exercise Help?

In This Post:

Does exercising help improve cardiovascular disease in the elderly?

Research says yes! But … it depends. It depends on many factors such as the overall wellbeing of the individual, the type of exercise completed, primary care recommendations, and so on.  

Condition

Cardiovascular disease or CVD refers to any condition that involves the heart and the blood vessels. Those include:

1.     Coronary artery disease (CAD) caused by atherosclerosis

2.     Heart failure (HF) and cardiomyopathy

3.     Rhythm disorders (problems in pumping blood)

4.     Valvular heart disease (disorders of the heart valves)

5.     Infections of the heart

6.   Congenital heart disease

However, out of these diseases, some are associated with aging at a higher rate, such as CAD and heart failure.

Coronary arteries are the blood vessels that supply the cardiac muscle (or the heart tissue) with blood, oxygen, and nutrients, thus they play an important role in keeping the heart functioning. Myocardial infarction or MI for short, is when atherosclerotic plaque is built up in the coronary arteries and causes them to narrow, thus reducing the amount of blood to the heart. The plaque build-up can cause an area of the heart to receive no blood which leads to muscle tissue damage (i.e. blockage in vessels, no blood to the heart, no oxygen & no nutrition to the tissue, no cellular function, tissue dies). A heart attack is a result of this.

Heart Failure (HF) is when the heart cannot pump blood sufficiently to the rest of the body. This can be a right side (of the heart) failure; a failure to pump blood to the lungs to get oxygenated, or left side failure; a failure to pump blood to the rest of the body. HF is caused by hypertension, diabetes, cardiomyopathy, and other related causes.

Before delving into the effects of exercise and types of exercise, let’s first familiarize with a concept: VO2 max.

What is VO2 max?

VO2 max is a measurement to quantify the fitness of an individual. So VO2 max to fitness is like meters to distance. Aside from how VO2 max is measured, it means how well the heart pumps blood, how well the blood gets oxygenated, and how well tissues extract that oxygen from the blood (or red blood cells to be exact). The higher the VO2 max the more fit an individual is. 

Research

The most important idea to recognize is that elderly individuals do have the ability to improve their VO2max and consequently their cardiovascular issues through exercise. A Baltimore longitudinal study (a study taking place over many years) saw that the peak VO2 in distance runners aged 60-80 years was 30-40% higher than non-trained but active age peers. In terms of elderly with cardiovascular disease, during a field research study, researchers witnessed a mean increase of 16% in peak VO2 among 60 patients aged 60-70 years old following 3 months of aerobic training beginning 8 weeks after myocardial infarction (MI). Also, a randomized control trial of 200 patients 60-89 years old (mean 72 years) who were recovering from heart failure recorded an increase in quality of life after a 24-week program of aerobic exercise plus low resistance strength training. Therefore, the main point to take away from this is that elderly individuals with or recovering from cardiovascular issues can benefit from the application of aerobic exercise.

Exercises

There are a wide variety of aerobic exercise training modalities that can help elderly individuals improve their cardiovascular condition. What exercise would “work best” for a given individual will depend on their given health condition and their current lifestyle. However, a low impact and traditionally safe aerobic exercise modality is a stationary exercise bike, or even a pedal exercise machine. A study investigating cardiac rehabilitation saw that interval exercises (a mix of both rest and exercise over short periods of time), not steady state (constant speed over long periods of time) is more beneficial in improving a person’s exercise capacity. Therefore, this study recommended work phases (when the individual is actually pedaling) of 30 s and recovery phases (when no exercise is taking place) of 60 s are useful, using an intensity of 50% of maximum short-term exercise. More generally though, it has been recorded that short periods of interval aerobic exercise has been shown to be superior to continuous exercise in improving aerobic capacity in patients with CAD. However, at the end of the day, even something as simple as walking around the neighbourhood could hold potential benefits. Some exercise is better than no exercise.

-Cardiovascular disease or CVD refers to any condition that involves the heart and the blood vessels. -Elderly individuals with or recovering from cardiovascular issues can benefit from the application of aerobic exercise. -Interval training has been seen to provide more benefits to those with CVD, but even something as simple as walking can help in the long run.

**If you believe that aerobic exercise will help you or someone you know, please contact a registered healthcare professional for more information.

**For more detail on this topic or to recommend future content, please contact us.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Effect of Exercise on Type 1 Diabetes: More than Meets the Eye

  Pathology :                Insulin is an important player for anabolic reactions in the body. In other words, when there are plenty of nutrients, like after a meal, insulin signaling makes the body use those and fill up the fatty acid and glycogen storages, and also signals for muscle build up (i.e., protein synthesis). Thus, insulin is a crucial endocrine hormone which without it many body functions are impaired. In type 1 diabetes, autoimmune destruction of beta cells takes place and due to loss of beta cell mass, the body cannot make enough insulin or even none at all. How is it bad? Before we go any further, let’s do a simplified run of how insulin works. There is about 4 grams of glucose circulating in the blood of healthy individuals all the time. After a meal or snack, when blood glucose rises, insulin is secreted into the bloodstream. How? Beta cells of the pancreas make insulin which is later picked up by blood circulatin...
1 comment
Read more

YES!! Physical Activity Can Benefit Those with ALS.

Pathology Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS is a motor neuron neurodegenerative disease that, like Alzheimer’s, is also associated with cognitive impairments as there are overlaps between ALS and frontotemporal degeneration. The causes for this disease are not exactly known. Although there are known genetic and environmental factors that lead to this disease, the interaction of genetic and environmental exposure can vary individually. You might ask how the interaction between the two leads to ALS. Well, there are certain genes (we carry them all along our lifetime) which are acted on by time and environmental exposure. These continue to have their effects until a certain point in time when the process of neurodegeneration begins and symptoms appear. Clinical presentations are divided into bulbar or spinal-onset and depend on the degree of upper motor neuron or lower motor neuron involvement. In the bulbar onset the disease affects speech and swallowing (dysarthria and dysphagia)...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lewy Body Dementia: Can Physical Activity be a Non-pharmaceutical Intervention?

  Pathology: Lewy body Dementia (LBD) is a very complicated disease both in terms of pathology and treatment. This is the one type of disease that has both characteristics of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. What distinguishes between the types of diseases is the timing of the appearance of symptoms. If symptoms of dementia happen before that of Parkinson’s, the situation is diagnosed as dementia with Lewy bodies or Lewy body dementia. On the contrary, Parkinson’s disease dementia is diagnosed when cognitive impairment happens after Parkinson’s disease. In essence, it is the formation of Lewy bodies and over time the abnormal accumulation of these bodies that leads to the clinical symptoms. These protein deposits often take place in pre-synaptic terminals that are responsible for neurotransmitter release and cycling. Symptoms of LBD can be divided to three levels of cognitive, behavioral, and physical. Cognitive symptoms can begin with presentation of non-amnestic cogni...
Post a Comment
Read more