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Exercise Study Finds Sweat Is a Deterrent to Death by Stroke

ASSOCIATED PRESS

You don’t have to be a super-athlete to significantly reduce your risk of stroke, but you do have to exercise consistently, a recent study finds.

“It adds to evidence that an active way of life may prevent stroke death,” said researcher Steven N. Blair of the Cooper Institute of Dallas, co-author of the report in the April issue of the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.

Blair and colleague Chong Do Lee of West Texas A&M; University looked at data on 16,878 men ages 40 to 87 who had no history of heart attack or stroke at the start of the study.

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The researchers gave the men treadmill tests and sorted them into low-, medium- and high-fitness groups.

The men in the highest fitness group had a 68% lower risk of stroke death than the men who were in the lowest group, the study found. But the men in the moderate group had almost as much benefit--a 63% lower risk.

Other studies have indicated that simply being active, doing things like walking regularly, might reduce stroke risk. “I would strongly recommend to those 50 million inactive adults to participate in any kind of exercise to protect against stroke mortality,” Lee said.

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But this study documented a striking benefit from strenuous activity that can produce fitness gains.

To be moderately fit, a person would have to run regularly for 20 to 40 minutes, three to five times a week, Lee said. To be highly fit, a person would have be at the recreationally competitive level, Lee said.

The findings are in line with previous research on the protection that exercise gives against dying of a heart attack.

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Early studies on heart disease commonly focused on runners, and led to the running boom of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Later research, including work done by Blair, found that it took far less intense activity to get out of the highest risk group for heart disease--those people who do no exercise.

These studies led the surgeon general to recommend that people do at least 30 minutes of moderate activity such as walking or gardening a minimum of several days a week.

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The new findings on stroke are similar to those on heart disease in that the biggest benefit comes from getting out of the lowest-fit group, said researcher Barry Franklin of William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., who was not involved in the study.

The study also indicates that the effort required to be a super-athlete doesn’t mean there is automatically much greater protection against stroke death, compared to those with a moderate level of fitness.

“That kind of finding is coming up with increasing frequency in the last decade or more,” said researcher Carl Foster of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.

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