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 While plenty of previous research has documented the health benefits
of biking as part of a regular workout routine, the current studies
offer fresh evidence that cycling for commutes or leisure may also
be good for the heart.
“Many people think that being physically active means doing regular
structured exercise, which can be a huge barrier to an active
lifestyle,” said Anders Grontved, senior author of one of the
studies.
“Our study shows that biking either for recreation or as a way to
commute is also great for heart health,” Grontved, a researcher at
the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, said by email.
For this study, Grontved and colleagues analyzed data on more than
45,000 Danish adults who biked regularly for commuting or
recreation. Over 20 years of follow up, bikers had 11 percent to 18
percent fewer heart attacks than people who didn’t do any cycling,
researchers report in the journal Circulation.
Overall, participants had 2,892 heart attacks during the study.
Researchers estimate that more than 7 percent of all heart attacks
could have been averted by taking up cycling and keeping it up on a
regular basis.
Biking as little as an hour a week provided some protection against
coronary artery disease, the study also found.
And the results also suggest it’s never too late to start.
Among adults who didn’t bike at the start of the study, those who
took up cycling within the first five years had about a 25 percent
lower risk of developing heart disease than the people who remained
non-bikers.
This study is observational, and can’t prove that commuting by bike
or cycling for fun actually prevents heart attacks, the authors
note.
A second study in the Journal of the American Heart Association
study also linked bicycle commutes to several factors that can
influence heart health including lower odds of obesity, high
cholesterol or elevated blood pressure.
For that study, researchers followed more than 20,000 Swedish adults
over 10 years.
At the start of the study, the average age was about 43 and people
who biked to work were 15 percent less likely to be obese, 13
percent less likely have high blood pressure and 15 percent less
likely to have high cholesterol than those who used public
transportation or drove to work.
By the end of the study, people who switched from sedentary commutes
to biking commutes were also less likely to be obese, have diabetes,
hypertension or high cholesterol than the ones who remained
non-bikers.
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At the end, people who biked had a 39 percent lower risk of obesity
overall, 11 percent lower risk of high blood pressure, 20 percent
lower risk of high cholesterol and 18 percent lower diabetes risk.
“And, people who were sedentary at baseline, but switched to active
commuting during follow-up also saw substantial reductions in the
risk of developing these disorders,” said senior study author Paul
Franks of Lund University in Sweden.
Naturally, the process of switching from passive to active commuting
not only involves increased moderate intensity physical activity,
but also a reduction in sedentary behaviors like sitting in a car or
on a bus,” Franks said by email.
There didn’t appear to be a minimum amount of time or distance
required to lower the risk of heart disease, though people with more
frequent longer rides did tend to have a greater reduction in risk
than those who took shorter bike trips or cycled less often.
Like the first study, this one doesn’t prove that commuting by bike
directly improves cardiovascular health or prevents heart attacks,
the authors note.
But based on their findings, the researchers estimated that
maintaining biking habits or switching from passive commuting to
biking may have prevented 24 percent of obesity cases, 6 percent of
hypertension diagnoses, 13 percent of high cholesterol diagnoses,
and 11 percent of the cases of diabetes.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2faItTB Circulation and http://bit.ly/2fetZjI
Journal of the American Heart Association, online October 31, 2016.
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