|
Exercise
May Improve Wasting in Heart Patients These
local anti-inflammatory effects of exercise may reduce the skeletal muscle
wasting seen in patients with chronic heart failure, researchers suggest. "For
patients with stable chronic heart failure, regular aerobic exercise training
should not be regarded as rehabilitation only, but as a continuing treatment
with the potential to modify the underlying disease process," Dr. Stephan
Gielen of the University of Leipzig Heart Center in Germany said in a statement.
Gielen
and colleagues randomly assigned 20 men with stable chronic heart failure to a
control group or to an exercise-training group for 6 months. Men in the training
group participated in group workouts and rode a stationary bicycle daily for 20
minutes at workloads corresponding to 70% of maximal oxygen uptake. At
the start of the study, local expression of inflammatory factors called
cytokines was significantly increased in skeletal muscle compared with blood
levels of these cytokines, which were only slightly higher than normal. There
were no changes in cytokine levels in the control group. Consistent
with previous reports, exercise training also improved peak oxygen uptake by
29%. "Taken
together, these results indicate that long-term aerobic endurance training in
chronic heart failure patients has anti-inflammatory effects on the skeletal
muscle," Gielen and colleagues write. The local anti-inflammatory effects
of exercise may reduce the wasting process of wasting that occurs as chronic
heart failure progresses. In
an editorial, two researchers say this study offers the "interesting
possibility that inflammatory mediators contribute to the skeletal muscle
fatigue that plagues patients with heart failure." "Here's
a new biochemical pathway that has not been studied," said Dr. Douglas L.
Mann of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in a statement. Because these
pathways can be altered by therapeutic interventions, he suggests that
anti-inflammatory strategies might be useful for treating wasting in heart
failure patients. SOURCE:
Journal of the American College of Cardiology, September 3, 2003. |