Published
A new study suggests that exercise can be just as effective as drugs when it comes to keeping blood pressure under control.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 75 millionadults in the United States have to manage high blood pressure, where it exceeds the threshold of 140 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg).
The condition can increase their risk of developing heart disease or experiencing a stroke, both of which are leading causes of death in the U.S.
Moreover, high blood pressure drives an expense of around $48.6 billion per year nationally, including the cost of medication, accessed health care, and absence from work.
People with high blood pressure typically follow an antihypertensive or blood pressure-lowering treatment, which includes special medication. At the same time, specialists sometimes advise that people make lifestyle changes to help them manage their blood pressure.
One such change is to take regular, structured exercise that can be of several types:
- endurance exercises, such as walking, jogging, or swimming
- high-intensity interval training, involving short bursts of intensive exercise
- dynamic resistance, including strength training
- isometric resistance, such as the plank exercise
- a combination of endurance and resistance exercises
However, no studies have yet compared the effectiveness of physical activity in lowering blood pressure with that of antihypertensive medication.
A new study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine — a BMJpublication — aims to address this gap in the literature.
Findings indicate similar effects
Since there are no studies that directly compare the effects of blood pressure medication with those of structured exercise, the study analyzed the data of various research projects that focused on one or other of these approaches.
The researchers — from institutions across Europe and the U.S., including the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom, and the Stanford University School of Medicine in California — explain that structured exercise helps lower systolic blood pressure, which measures the blood pressure in the blood vessels as the heart beats.
In the current study, they looked at the data from 194 clinical trials that focused on antihypertensive drugs and their impact on systolic blood pressure, and another 197 clinical trials, looking at the effect of structured exercise on blood pressure measurements. In total, these trials collected information from 39,742 participants.
Dr. Huseyin Naci — from the Department of Health Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science — and colleagues conducted several sets of analyses on the data from the trials.
