New Evidence: Exercise Helps Heart Disease, Increases Survival Better than
Angioplasty

Saturday, July 11, 2009 by: S. L. Baker, features writer
Key concepts: Disease, Heart disease and Angioplasty

(NaturalNews) At the European Association of Cardiovascular Prevention and
Rehabilitation meeting recently held in Barcelona, Spain, new heart research was
presented that shows one treatment in particular can provide remarkable help for
patients with certain forms of serious heart disease. It's not a new drug or
surgical procedure. Instead, it's a natural therapy -- plain old-fashioned
regular exercise.

In fact, in several studies just presented at the meeting, exercise reduced the
markers of heart disease in patients following coronary artery bypass surgery
(CABG). What's more, it improved indications of disease in people with heart
failure, a condition usually thought to be incurable and often just treated with
symptom-relieving drugs. But the news that's perhaps most likely to make some
interventional cardiologists' hearts skip a beat or two was the evidence
presented that showed that exercise improved cardiac event-free survival in
coronary patients better than angioplasty with stents.
Also called percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), angioplasty is commonly
used to help people with coronary artery disease whose arteries are narrowed and
even blocked by a build-up of sticky plaque. By threading a thin tube through a
blood vessel in the arm or groin, interventional cardiologists perform
angioplasty to restore blood flood through a clogged artery. A tiny balloon at
the end of the tube is inflated when it reaches the exact spot of blockage. That
pushes the plaque outward against the walls of the artery, restoring blood flow.
A small metal device called a stent is also carried by the tube and deployed at
the site of the blockage in order to prop open the artery.

This approach to treating heart disease is a huge business. A report in
Bloomberg News last fall noted that about 800,000 angioplasties are performed
each year in the U.S. at a cost of about $10 billion annually. And, although
many cardiologists consider angioplasty to be the "gold standard" of care in
most types of acute coronary events such as heart attack, the procedure's long
term benefits have been questioned by many doctors. In addition, the role of
angioplasty in treating other kinds of coronary disease, like angina, isn't
clear.

To help shed light on this issue, researchers at the University of Leipzig in
Germany conducted a study to compare the event-free survival rate in 101 stable
angina patients. Research subjects with the condition were divided randomly into
two groups. Each group was treated with either a regular exercise program or
with angioplasty.

The results, just presented at the European Association of Cardiovascular
Prevention and Rehabilitation meeting, showed that after five years of
follow-up, the study participants who went through exercise training had a
better event-free survival rate than those treated with stent angioplasty. In
the exercise group, 63 percent of patients had survived, free of cardiac events.
However, only 40 percent in the angioplasty group had survived without cardiac
problems (which included heart attack, stroke and death).

Two other studies released at the Barcelona conference also back up the idea
that exercise can often help even patients with very serious heart problems.
Research by Dr. Tomasz Mikulski and colleagues from the Medical Research Centre
in Warsaw, Poland, showed that aerobic training using an exercise bike not only
improved the physical fitness of cardiac patients following bypass surgery, but
also reduced their cholesterol levels and markers of inflammation (which are
associated with heart disease).

Dr. Marcus Sandri from the University of Leipzig presented data showing that a
moderate exercise program daily for four weeks improved the function of
endothelial cells in patients with heart failure. This is important because
endothelial cells, which line the circulatory system, are associated with the
progression of heart disease and heart failure when they don't function
properly.

No improvement was noted in the control group of heart failure patients who did
not exercise. Dr Sandri noted in a statement to the media that the beneficial
effect of exercise was seen as much in older subjects as in younger. "The
effects of exercise were not diminished in our older heart failure patients
which suggests that exercise as a treatment might be just as effective in older
patients as younger," he explained.

http://www.naturalnews.com/026596_disease_heart_disease_angioplasty.html

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/angioplasty.html

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601202&sid=animWucsIsEQ&refer=healthcar\
e