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Good News for Women- Old News for Men
One of the trends in modern medicine is to find out if women and men are the same or different.  (Most Seabrookers have discovered this long ago.)  This is playing out in a variety of clinical studies in which women are now included when in the past they were ignored (maybe, not ignored, but just excluded.)  This leads to a great deal of "redoing" all those trials that examined the effect of certain drugs or treatments that had been previously performed in males.
  
Exercise, Heart Events, and Women
The New England Journal of Medicine reported last August results from the Nurses Health Study which is an ongoing study of survival of women nurses, and which includes a large 121,700 current or former nurses.  These women are educated and knowledgeable about health, not unlike our females on Seabrook.  In the sample studied there were over 70,000 women who grouped into physical activity  quintiles which ranged from virtually none to vigorous (such as brisk walking, jogging, bicycling, heavy gardening, heavy housework - all strenuous enough to build up a sweat.)  The results predictably  (that is, if you are of the school of thought that most things good for men are also good for women of the same species) showed a very powerful effect of exercise on whether women experienced heart attacks and or death from heart attacks.  This effect was present whether the women had other risk factors such as age, smoking and high lipids.  In other words the more one exercised,  regardless of all the other risk factors, the less likely one was to have a cardiac event. 
  
Just how much risk reduction is there?
Moderate to vigorous exercise of 4 to 7 hours a week lowers the risk of a heart event by 31% and over 7 hours reduces the risk by 37%.  That's a pretty good return on one's time investment, and the risk of heart disease is just one of the benefits.  There are other data (primarily in men) that show a reduction in cancer, depression and other diseases - and, if it is true in men, it's probably true for women!

More Good News
Although Seabrookers are likely to play tennis, walk, workout at the club and all the other things we know we should do, what was interesting in this report was that one could get as much benefit from brisk walking as what some of us might consider more challenging exercise such as jogging or maximum stress on the treadmill.  All that really mattered was that exercise be regular (ideally up to 30 minutes a day) and of sufficient stress that one work up a sweat and elevate the heart rate.  With Spring now in full swing on the Island, it's time for Seabrooker of both genders to be serious about their exercise programs.

MUSCHelath.com Online Health Library Related Links:
Exercise

Other Online Resources:
Exercise for a Healthy Heart
Exercise in Post-Menopausal Women (American Osteopathic Association)
Patterns and Trends in Physical Activity (American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons)
Physical Activity (National Women's Health Information Center)

Additional Online Resources Outside MUSCHealth.com:
(MedlinePlus, is an excellent source of health information from the world's largest medical library, the National Library of Medicine. Health professionals and consumers alike can depend on it for information that is authoritative and up to date. MedlinePlus has extensive information from the National Institutes of Health and other trusted sources on over 650 diseases and conditions.)

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