I don't need to tell you that cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the leading cause of morbidity and premature mortality. Like the so-called age-related decreases in muscle mass seen with age the premature aging of the cardiovascular system can be slowed by maintaining what we have for longer. Various physiological factors and lifestyle behaviours affect the time course and magnitude of these events with aging. Hence, CVD is most likely not the result of aging per se but rather the result of neglect.
Modulatory influences on ageing of the vasculature in healthy humans.
Seals DR, Moreau KL, Gates PE, Eskurza I.
Department of Integrative Physiology, University of Colorado, 354 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
Increased arterial stiffness and impaired vascular endothelial function are the two most clinically important events that occur with vascular ageing in humans. Together they contribute to age-associated increases in systolic hypertension, left ventricular remodeling and diastolic dysfunction, coronary artery and other atherosclerotic vascular diseases, congestive heart failure, and the attendant cardiac events such as myocardial infarction. However, there is marked individual variability in arterial stiffness and endothelial function with advancing age, which suggests modulation by one or, more likely, several biological and/or lifestyle factors. Consistent with this idea, habitual aerobic exercise appears to attenuate or completely prevent these adverse changes. Other factors including sex hormone status, circulating total and low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol levels, total body and abdominal fatness, and dietary sodium intake also appear to influence arterial stiffening and endothelial dysfunction with ageing. It is now clear that a number of physiological factors and lifestyle behaviors collectively determine how much and, perhaps in some cases, if functionally or clinically significant vascular ageing occurs in adult humans. Of these, the existing evidence indicates that habitual aerobic exercise may be the single most important modulatory influence.
PMID: 16537099 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
So what are you guys waiting for? Get up off your butts and take a walk.
In the next few days I will do my best to follow this up with a definition of aerobic exercise as well as dose recommendations. Unless someone else would like to contribute here...
