Regular exercise can keep your heart young: study

Exercising four to five times a week is necessary to keep your heart and arteries young, according to a study.

While any form of exercise reduces the overall risk of death from heart problems, the new study, published in The Journal of Physiology, shows different sizes of arteries are affected differently by varying amounts of exercise.

Two to three days a week of 30 minutes exercise may be sufficient to minimise stiffening of middle sized arteries, while exercising four to five days a week is required to keep the larger central arteries youthful.

"This work is really exciting because it enables us to develop exercise programmes to keep the heart youthful and even turn back time on older hearts and blood vessels," said Benjamin Levine from the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine (IEEM) in Dallas, US.

"Previous work by our group has shown that waiting until 70 is too late to reverse a heart's ageing, as it is difficult to change cardiovascular structure even with a year of training," said Levine.

As people age, arteries - which transport blood in and out of the heart - are prone to stiffening, which increases the risk of heart disease.

The researchers performed a cross-sectional examination of 102 people over 60 years old, with a consistently logged lifelong exercise history.

Detailed measures of arterial stiffness were collected from all participants, who were then categorised in one of four groups depending on their lifelong exercise history.

The team found that a lifelong history of casual exercise (two to three times a week) resulted in more youthful middle sized arteries, which supply oxygenated blood to the head and neck.

However, people who exercised four to five times per week also had more youthful large central arteries, which provide blood to the chest and abdomen, in addition to healthier middle sized ones.

The fact that the larger arteries appear to require more frequent exercise to remain youthful will aid the development of long-term exercise programmes, researchers said.