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EXERCISE
Exercise As Effective As Drugs For Treating Heart
Disease, Diabetes
By Alexandra Sifferlin @acsifferlin
Oct. 01, 2013
5 Comments
Forget the pills — there’s new evidence that exercise may be as
effective as medications in treating heart disease and
diabetes.
Doctors now advise everyone, from young children to older
adults, to become more physically active. It’s the best way to
maintain a healthy weight, keep the heart muscle strong, and
improve your mental outlook. But can exercise be as good as
drugs in actually preventing disease and treating serious
chronic illnesses?
That’s what researchers from the London School of
Economics, Harvard Medical School and Stanford University
Zia Soleil
School of Medicine wanted to find out. They compared the
effect of exercise to that of drug therapy on four different
health outcomes: heart disease, recovery from stroke, heart failure treatment and preventing
The scientists pooled the results of 305 trials involving 339,274 people who were randomly
assigned to either an exercise program or a drug­based therapy and found that there were no
detectable differences between the two groups when it came to preventing diabetes and keeping
additional events at bay for heart patients. And the physical activity was most powerful for
participants who experienced a stroke. The only group that didn’t benefit from the exercise over
drugs were patients with heart failure, likely because the strain of the physical activity wasn’t
recommended for their condition.
DE TA LER
diabetes.
How Exercise May Lower Breast
Cancer Risk
How Exercise Can Moderate
Brain Damage Caused By
Drinking
Brain Exercises Better than
Drugs in Preventing Cognitive
Decline
(MORE: Exercise Alone Can Melt Away Dangerous Belly Fat in Diabetics)
The findings involving diabetes patients confirmed previous trials that documented how
effective physical activity can be in bringing blood sugar levels down.
So why do most doctors prescribe drugs over exercise? There are more rigorous studies testing the effectiveness of drug therapies to
treat common diseases, say the study authors, than there are studies that test the power of exercise. With these results, however, the
researchers hope to see more work on how exercise can be a significant part of a treatment program for diseases ranging from heart
problems to diabetes.
Those studies will need to analyze physical activity in the same way that drugs are studied, to determine how much exercise is needed to
trigger beneficial changes in the body that can treat or prevent disease.

2. Currently, to maintain optimum health, federal experts recommend that people exercise at a moderate intensity for about 2.5 hours a
week. But fewer than half of Americans meet that recommendation, and a third of Americans don’t get any exercise at all. The latest
findings should encourage even those who aren’t active, however, since research shows even just talking a brisk walk can help lower the
risk for high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes, and be as powerful as medications in keeping the body healthy.
Alexandra Sifferlin @acsifferlin
Alexandra Sifferlin is a writer and producer for TIME Healthland. She is a graduate from the Northwestern University Medill School
of Journalism.