This Week’s Most Ridiculous Heart Health Headline: “Running One Marathon Can Make Your Arteries Healthier”

Yes, CNBC went with that silly headline.

ABC went with “Training For Your 1st Marathon May Reverse Aging.”

The usually reliable Allison Aubrey and NPR went with ” Ready For Your First Marathon? Training Can Cut Years Off Your Cardiovascular Age.”

Aaarggh! As the newly-minted wife of the skeptical cardiologist likes to say.

The media threw caution to the wind and went gaga over this study which proves nothing of the sorts of things described above.

They may have been egged on by the authors who were wildly overstating the implications of the study

“What we found in this study is that we’re able to reverse the processes of aging that occur in the [blood] vessels,” says study author Dr. Anish Bhuva, a British Heart Foundation Cardiology Fellow at Barts Heart Centre in the UK..

Allison Aubrey did manage to quote a sensible person in her report to counter the balderdash being thrown around by the study authors:

The heart health benefits documented in the study likely have much less to do with the one-time race event than they do with the fact that the training program got people in the habit of regular, moderately intense exercise, says exercise researcher Dr. Tim Church, an adjunct professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center. On average, the participants ran between 6 and 13 miles per week, during their training, so, not super long distances.”The training program was very practical and very doable,” says Church, who was not involved in the study, but who reviewed the training regimen and results for NPR. “It was a slow build up over six months,” Church says.

I know a thing or two about aortic distensibility. In 1992 I described a new noninvasive method for quantification of aortic elastic properties in a paper published in the American Heart Journal entitled “Evaluation of aortic distensibility with transesophageal echocardiography.”

One thing I know for sure is aortic distensibility is highly dependent on systolic blood pressure and any changes that were seen in this study could simply have been related to lower systolic blood pressure.

The authors acknowledge this limitation along with about a million other limitations at the end of their paper. The limitations are legion and I’ve copied them at the end of this post. I’m quite surprised that JACC published it given those limitations and the absence of any important new findings.

Taking up exercise is really good for you but do not be fooled by these ridiculous headlines into thinking running one marathon has any special way to make you younger.

Take up exercise that you can sustain and that won’t leave you injured or frustrated.

Pheidippidesically Yours,

-ACP

Study limitations

This study was conducted in healthy individuals; therefore, our findings may not apply to patients with hypertension who have stiffer arteries that may be less modifiable (40). From these data, however, those with higher SBP at baseline appeared to derive greater benefit. This study was not designed to provide structured training, but rather to observe the effects of real-world preparation for a marathon, which randomized control trials cannot address. Nevertheless, information on the intensity, frequency, and type of exercise training would have been valuable to understand further the beneficial effects on aortic stiffness. The modest change in peak VO2 may be related to exercise training intensity or low adherence, which reflects the real world. Peak VO2 was performed semisupine to allow concurrent echocardiography, and this may also have reduced sensitivity to changes due to running or running efficiency. We assessed only marathon finishers—plausibly, nonfinishers could have had different vascular responsiveness. The causal link of exercise to measured changes is only inferred—marathon training may lead to other lifestyle modifications (dietary, other behavioral factors), or alterations in lipid profiles and glucose metabolism, although these have not been previously associated with changes in aortic stiffness (11). We did not examine the effect of exercise on peripheral arteries or endothelial dysfunction. Although individual participants served as internal controls, there may have been run-in bias for the initial BP measurement. This appears unlikely, as BP changes would not have been age-related nor correlated with the change in separate measures (e.g., aortic stiffness) with training. Estimated aortic ages are approximations and are based on the same dataset at baseline rather than independent observations. The exercise dose-response curve here is not sampled—only training for a first-time marathon with single timepoint assessment. This area warrants further study. We measured distensibility on modulus imaging acquired at 1.5-T rather than steady-state free precession imaging. The free-breathing sequence we used achieved good temporal resolution, but may be susceptible to through-plane motion. However, this and similar sequences correlate well with breath-held cine imaging, and show similar associations with aging (18). If error was introduced into distensibility measurements related to through-plane motion, the resultant noise would minimize the effect size related to exercise training, and therefore would be unlikely to account for our key findings. PP undergoes amplification from central to more peripheral locations, typically being ∼6 mm Hg higher in the descending thoracic than the ascending aorta (20). This PP amplification is not accounted for in our analysis, because it would have involved invasive measures of aortic pressure at each location. A sensitivity analysis suggested that the likely impact of this effect on the observed changes after training would be minimal; however, we cannot completely exclude the possibility that changes in PP amplification contribute to the observed differences. Diaphragmatic descending aortic distensibility data reported here were, however, higher than expected, although there is limited published data for comparison (41). Unlike Voges et al. (41), central rather than brachial PP was used, which would explain greater distensibility, and the use of 1.5-T phase-contrast modulus may accentuate image contrast differences between 3T gradient echo sequences.

 

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7 thoughts on “This Week’s Most Ridiculous Heart Health Headline: “Running One Marathon Can Make Your Arteries Healthier””

  1. I certainly agree with Dr. Pearson. I started working with a trainer several years ago. She pushed me too much causing torn muscles and tendons in my hip. Be cautious when starting any exercise program.

    Reply
  2. not sure…now that I have it, I have to switch around because a significant duration of any single one brings it back but I am suspicious of the frog kick, which otherwise I prefer. In Pt they advised me to stay in the pool (the only exercise they could think of since I couldn’t even walk when I hobbled in) but quit kicking at all for a period of time and then ease back into it. I’ve done water aerobics too but the list of moves that they use and I should not is rather long, so it takes a lot of mental work to adapt; it gets hard to sustain cardio without also sustaining some move that my hip/back/knees complain about.

    Reply
  3. Well — that’s what I do. But last year’s start did result in a persistent hip bursitis that stuck with me, toned down but not eliminated by a season of PT; turns out I have to be careful on which kind of kicks etc…

    Reply
    • Interesting….
      I have never mastered freestyle swimming but in the days when i spent time in swimming pools I would alternate between breast stroke and a leisurely type of back stroke both of which utilized a frog type of kick. Was it freestyle kicking that produced the hip bursitis?

      Reply
  4. Running marathons will kill your knees and feet and probably kill you from over exertion. It’s totally uncontrollable exertion.

    I have a question: when I do my 30 minutes on the NuStep in the morning, I progress through 5 minute segments. I can control my heart rate easily: 5 minutes @ 80’s BPM range, 5 minutes @ 90’s, 5 min @100’s and 5 min 110-115 (my max based on age/heart disease) then 5 min back in 90’s and 5 min 80’s.

    If I try the same routine in the late afternoon when I’m tired the BPM is immediately 100’s and it’s very hard to keep it under 120 BPM. I step at least 20-30 steps per minute less.

    What’s happening?

    Reply

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