Lasting benefits of your exercises

THE workouts we completed years ago may continue to influence and improve our health today, according to a fascinating new study of the current lives and health of people who joined an exercise study a decade before.

The findings suggest that the benefits of exercise can be more persistent than many of us might expect. In medicine, lingering health consequences from experiments, known as legacy effects, are common and often commendable.

But whether exercise studies likewise produce legacy effects has been unknown, although the issue matters. We know from other science and disheartening personal experience that we lose much of our fitness and associated health benefits if we stop.

For the new study, which was published in Frontiers in Physiology, scientists at Duke University decided to find out. Most of the researchers had been involved a decade earlier in a large-scale exercise experiment called STRRIDE (for Studies Targeting Risk Reduction Interventions through Defined Exercise).

In that experiment, which ran from 1998 to 2003, hundreds of sedentary, overweight volunteers between the ages of 40 and 60 had remained inactive as a control group or begun exercising. Volunteers completed three sessions of their assigned workout each week for eight months, while scientists tracked changes to their aerobic fitness, blood pressure, insulin sensitivity and waist circumference.

In general, each of those health markers improved in the people who exercised and not in the controls.

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POLLEN, HAY FEVER STUDY

IT’S long been a cruel mystery for many hay fever sufferers: why should they be hit badly on days when the pollen count is low?

But now British scientists have found that the solution lies in the particular type of pollen in the air.

Experts from universities and research institutions across the UK hope that their landmark study will lead to personalised pollen forecasts, based on the exact species that each hay fever sufferer is allergic to. |