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Eat Less or Exercise More? Either Way Leads to More Youthful Hearts |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: Overweight people who lose a moderate amount of weight get an immediate benefit in the form of better heart health, according to a study conducted at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "They're virtually guaranteed that it will have a salutary effect on their cardiovascular system." Studying a group of healthy, overweight but not obese, middle-aged men and women, the researchers found that a yearlong regimen of either calorie restriction or exercise increase had positive effects on heart function. Their analysis revealed that heart function was restored to a more youthful state so that during the heart's filling phase (called diastole) it took less time for participants' hearts to relax and fill with blood. "During filling, the left ventricle is a suction pump," Kovács explains. Similarly, the heart's muscle and connective tissue are elastic, and after ejecting blood to the body during contraction (systole), the left ventricle springs back to draw in new blood (diastole). By the end of the yearlong study, both the calorie restriction and exercise groups of volunteers lost 12 percent of their weight and 12 percent of their body mass index (BMI), a measurement considered to be a fairly reliable indicator of the amount of body fat. Cardiologists can measure delicate alterations in diastolic function because of the work of Kovács, also professor of cell biology and physiology and adjunct professor of physics and of biomedical engineering, who developed a methodology called parameterized diastolic filling (PDF) formalism, which analyzes the filling of the heart according to physical laws and determines the chamber's elasticity and stiffness.
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