Exercise as Potent Medicine

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS, NYT

Exercise can be as effective as many frequently prescribed drugs in treating some of the leading causes of death, according to a new report. The study raises important questions about whether our health care system focuses too much on medications and too little on activity to combat physical ailments.

For the study, which was published in October in BMJ, researchers compared how well various drugs and exercise succeed in reducing deaths among people who have been diagnosed with several common and serious conditions, including heart disease and diabetes.

Comparative effectiveness studies are a staple of science, of course, especially in pharmaceutical research. Scientists often track how well one drug treats a condition compared with the outcome if they use a different drug. But few studies have directly compared drugs with exercise, and even fewer have compared outcomes in terms of mortality or whether the intervention significantly lessens the chance that someone with a disease will die from it, despite treatment.

So Huseyin Naci, a graduate student at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Dr. John Ioannidis, the director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center at the Stanford University School of Medicine, decided to create a comprehensive comparison of the effectiveness of drugs and exercise in lessening mortality among people who had been diagnosed with one of four diseases: heart disease, chronic heart failure, stroke or diabetes. They chose these particular conditions because those were the only ones for which they could find studies that had examined whether exercise lessened the risk of death among patients with that disease, Mr. Naci said.

(More here.)