Much like exercising in your leisure time, staying active on the job can be good for your heart: Researchers report that on-the-job physical activity is associated with reduced risk of heart failure. Overall, in a study of nearly 60,000 Finnish men and women, as levels of physical activ- ity at work went up, the risk of heart failure went down.Gang Hu, MD, PhD, of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, and colleagues commented in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, If this fnding represents a causal relation, this ap- proach is highly relevant to the improvement of health and longevity among working-aged people, because the increase in computer- ization and mechanization during the last decades has resulted in ever-increasing numbers of people being sedentary for most of their working time.Previous studies, the researchers noted, have focused instead on leisure-time activity.Dr. Hu and colleagues looked at heart failure incidence and levels of occupational, leisure-time and commuting physical activ- ity among 28,334 men and 29,874 women. Participants, who were initially free of heart failure, ranged in age from 25 to 74. Over an average followup of 18.4 years, 1,868 men and 1,640 women developed heart failure.(A chronic, progressive condition in which the heart cant pump enough blood to keep up with its workload, heart failure is not the same as a heart attack. Among older Americans, heart failure is the leading cause of hospitalization.)After adjusting for factors includ- ing other types of physical activity, the study found a signifcant overall trend for lower risk of heart failure associated with increased levels of on-the-job physical activity. The association was strongest for men with high levels of physical activity at work (17% were modera lower risk).As expected, both moderate and high levels of leisure-time physical activity were associated with lower likelihood of developing heart failure. Commuting in a way that burns off calories, such as walking or biking to work, was also linked to lower risk among women.Overall, people who managed to be active in more than one way-at work, at play or commuting in-between-were at the lowest risk of heart failure. Men with high levels of physical activity of all three types were at 31% lower risk of heart failure, while women were at 34% lower risk. – paragragh Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Sept. 28, 2010; abstract at <content. onlinejacc.org/cgi/content/abstract/56/14/1140>About Heart Failure,<www.heart.org/HEARTORG/ Conditions/HeartFailure/AboutHeartFailure/About- Heart-Failure_UCM_002044_Article.jsp>
