‘Very small amounts’ of intense physical activity may cut heart disease risk for women
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Key takeaways:
- In women, daily vigorous intermittent physical activity was tied to lower risks for major adverse cardiovascular events, myocardial infarction and heart failure.
- No significant association was observed for men.
Among nonexercising women, those who initiated a few minutes of vigorous lifestyle physical activity daily had substantially lower risk for any major adverse cardiovascular event, including myocardial infarction and heart failure, data show.
“Making short bursts of vigorous physical activity a lifestyle habit could be a promising option for women who are not keen on structured exercise or are unable to do it for any reason,” Emmanuel Stamatakis, PhD, professor of physical activity, lifestyle and population health at the Mackenzie Wearables Research Hub at the Charles Park Centre and the School of Health Sciences at the University of Sydney, said in a related press release. “As a starting point, it could be as simple as incorporating, throughout the day, a few minutes of activities like stair climbing, carrying shopping, uphill walking, playing tag with a child or pet or either uphill or power walking.”
The findings were published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
Stamatakis and colleagues evaluated associations of daily vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity duration with overall major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) and its subtypes among 13,018 women and 9,350 men who participated in the UK Biobank study. All participants self-reported no leisure-time exercise and no more than one recreational walk per week at baseline and wore an accelerometer on their wrist for 7 days.
Overall, 331 MACE occurred in women and 488 in men during a 7.9-year follow-up period.
Median daily vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity doses of 3.4 minutes had a dose-response association with all MACE (HR = 0.55; 95% CI, 0.41-0.75) and heart failure (HR = 0.33; 95% CI, 0.18-0.59) in women. In women, the median physical activity duration was associated with 45% lower risk for MACE, 51% lower risk for myocardial infarction and 67% lower risk for heart failure. However, in men, the dose-response curves were less clear with less statistical significance.
For women, minimum daily vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity doses of 1.2 to 1.6 minutes were associated with 30% lower risk for all MACE (HR = 0.7; 95% CI, 0.58-0.86), 33% lower risk for MI (HR = 0.67; 95% CI, 0.5-0.91) and 40% lower risk for heart failure (HR = 0.6; 95% CI, 0.45-0.81). Researchers observed no statistical significance among men.
“Nonexercise vigorous incidental physical activity showed a beneficial dose-response with MACE outcomes, which was pronounced in women, among whom very small amounts of vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity (approximately 1.5 to 4 minutes per day) were associated with substantially lower risks of overall MACE, myocardial infarction and heart failure,” the researchers wrote.
The researchers noted that the findings support sex-specific guidelines for CVD prevention.
“Importantly, the beneficial associations we observed were in women who committed to short bursts of vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity almost daily. This highlights the importance of habit formation, which is not always easy,” Stamatakis said in the release. “Vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity should not be seen as a quick fix — there are no magic bullets for health. But our results show that even a little bit higher intensity activity can help and might be just the thing to help people develop a regular physical activity — or even exercise — habit.”
Reference:
- Tiny, daily bursts of vigorous incidental physical activity could almost halve cardiovascular risk in middle-aged women. https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2024/12/04/tiny--daily-bursts-of-vigorous-incidental-physical-activity-coul.html. Published Dec. 4, 2024. Accessed Dec. 4, 2024.
Perspective
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Martha Gulati, MD, MS, FACC, FAHA, FASPC
This is an interesting paper because we’ve done some work in this exact space looking at sex differences related to physical activity. This sheds additional light, in my opinion, that there are sex differences, and gives us a lot of reasons why we should be studying both men and women and looking for things that are the same, but also looking for things that are different, particularly regarding physical activity.
What was really interesting was that they were looking at people that don’t do regular physical activity but do this vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. Specifically for women, it appeared that people who were not physically active, but did bursts of vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity, actually had reductions in cardiovascular events, particularly myocardial infarction and heart failure, and men did not see the same benefit that women did.
We had done some work that was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (Ji H, et al. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2024;doi:10.1016/j.jacc.2023.12.019) earlier this year, not looking at vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity, but looking at just physical activity, and we showed that there was a sex difference in the benefit that women gained vs. men. In fact, we showed that women, for every amount of exercise, got more out of exercise in terms of all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality. This is just another study showing that there are differences of the effect of physical activity, but especially for people that aren’t physically active, where you probably wouldn’t even think they’re doing activity and are probably just going about their life. In the surveys for this, they weren’t checking off that they did regular physical activity, but rather they were wearing a device that tracked this. This is like when people are doing things like walking up a hill or bringing in the groceries, walking short distances, climbing upstairs and doing housework. Those could be the things that were the vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity.
This study helped confirm our previous research, and I won’t say their research was exactly like ours. Ours documented physical activity. We weren’t looking at vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. In fact, when we studied those results, what I said was missing was activities of daily living. We only had self-reported activity. One of my theories about why women benefited so much more than men was that in addition to whatever physical activity men and women participated in, there are things we do in our regular daily life, but they disproportionately fall on women. Many women, once they get home, they have childcare responsibilities or elder parent care responsibilities. They may do more of the chores around the house. Combining our work and this work, they suggest there is a benefit to daily movement that seems to be more pronounced in females than in males.
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