Heart health: Who benefits more from exercise – women or men?

Women are less likely than men to adhere to the recommended exercise time. However, when they do, their hearts benefit more. This is demonstrated by a study in the journal Nature Cardiovascular Research .

The World Health Organization recommends that adults do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity or 75 minutes of vigorous -intensity physical activity per week, or a combination of both.

The team led by bioinformatician Jiajin Chen from Xiamen University in China analyzed data from the UK Biobank cohort study, which has been running since 2006. More than 85,000 participants from Great Britain wore a motion sensor. The researchers combined this information with subsequent health data.

According to studies, moderate to intense exercise of 150 minutes per week reduced the risk of coronary heart disease by 22 percent in women , but only by 17 percent in men.

In this disease, plaque builds up in the coronary arteries that supply the heart with blood and thus oxygen. This manifests itself in sufferers as chest pain , known as angina pectoris . However, the deposits can also lead to heart attacks and cardiac death.

The study also demonstrated significant benefits from longer exercise: With approximately 250 minutes of moderate to intense exercise per week , women can reduce their risk of coronary heart disease by around 30 percent. To achieve the same level, men need to invest around 530 minutes—more than twice as much time.

During an average observation period of approximately eight years, 3,764 events of coronary heart disease (CHD) occurred in approximately 80,000 people who were free of coronary heart disease (CHD) at baseline. The researchers also examined mortality. The analysis of approximately 5,000 people with CHD at the start of the study revealed that men needed to exercise about 1.7 times as much as women to achieve a comparable relative reduction in mortality risk during the observation period .