Can exercise reverse heart disease, namely plaque from your arteries?
Can intense exercise reverse heart disease? Now, it's well known that people that regularly exercise are less likely to suffer from cardiovascular events, such as heart attack, stroke, sudden death from cardiovascular disease. But up until now, it has not been thought that exercise could actually reverse plaque. Well, this new study interestingly showed exactly that.
"High-intensity interval training induces beneficial effects on coronary atheromatous plaques: a randomized trial," Elisabeth Kleivhaug Vesterbekkmo, et al, European Journal of Preventative Cardiology, March 27, 2023.
They took about 60 people and they all had previously had stents. So these are people with known cardiovascular disease with known plaque, and they divided them into two groups: one group they told them to do regular cardiac rehab, the other group they cause them to do intense exercises. This is in a form of like this Norwegian 4x4: 4 minutes of all out intense exercise, followed by 3 minutes of rest, followed by 4 minutes of exercise. Done for times of that. And they did it twice a week, and what they found was compared to the non-High intense exercise group the people that were intense exercise actually lost plaque. They actually studied this with something called intravascular ultrasound, which is considered the gold standard way to measure plaque in the arteries, and so they actually saw a significant reduction. This is to me something pretty cool. Now some caveats here: these are all men; these are all people that already had stenting procedures done, and they were all on medication. So there were some caveats around here but it does appear that exercise itself causes an independent effect that can reverse plaque. So if you need another reason to get out there and train hard, that may be one of them.
