Have you had a recent heart attack and want to either start up a cardio program or resume your previous aerobic exercise? How soon should this be?
A 2015 report in the American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology urges heart attack survivors to resume a cardio exercise program very soon after their cardiac event.
The idea of resuming aerobic exercise soon after seems to oppose the historical directive by doctors for people, following heart attacks, to be sedentary for months on end.
After an attack, the structure of the heart is altered, and this includes scarring of the cardiac muscle. This can lead to complications.
The Study
Researchers wanted to know if cardio exercise could remodel damaged heart tissue.
So they induced a heart attack in mice, after the mice spent six weeks on a wheel-running program.
Only five days after the heart attacks, the mice resumed the wheel exercise and did it for four weeks.
The hearts of these mice were then compared to those of sedentary mice (who’d also had the induced heart attacks).
The cardio-exercise mice had less scarring, inflammation and thinning of the cardiac muscle.
But what about People?
Shutterstock/Dmytro Zinkevych
Though people are different from lab mice, the same approach can be applied to them following a heart attack.
“There are two types of heart attacks (minor also called NSTEMI or major also called STEMI),” says Asim Cheema, MD, who’s board certified in internal medicine, cardiovascular diseases and interventional cardiology by the American Board of Internal Medicine. Dr. Cheema is with Your Doctors Online, an online doctor chat site.
“The standard recommendation is to start ambulation at 24 hours after heart attack, and physical activity two weeks after NSTEMI and four weeks after STEMI,” explains Dr. Cheema.
“This is also the wait time recommended before starting cardiac rehab after discharge from the hospital after MI [myocardial infarction – another term for heart attack].
“The recommendation is the same regardless of the level of activity prior to occurrence of heart attack.
“However, a sedentary person should be more gradual in establishing a regular exercise program and is more likely to benefit from the cardiac rehab than a person who was doing regular exercise prior to MI and can have return to full level of physical exertion over a much shorter time.”
