Men may need to exercise twice as much as women to achieve the same reduction in coronary heart disease risk, according to researchers, who say healthy living guidelines should take account of the sex differences.
Scientists analysed physical activity records from more than 80,000 people and found that the risk of heart disease fell 30% in women who clocked up 250 minutes of exercise each week. In contrast, men needed to reach 530 minutes, or nearly nine hours, a week to see the same effect.
The study builds on previous work that suggests women benefit more than men from the same amount of exercise, but that women are generally less physically active and less likely to meet recommended exercise targets.
Under NHS guidelines, men and women aged 16 to 64 should take at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise, or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise, each week, combined with muscle-strengthening activities at least twice a week.
But the latest work stresses the need for tailored advice for men and women, and highlights the substantial health benefits women can achieve with only moderate amounts of exercise. Globally, one in three women die of cardiovascular disease.
“Compared with male individuals, females derive equivalent health benefits with only half the exercise time,” the authors write in Nature Cardiovascular Research. “The findings might have potential to encourage females to engage in physical activity,” they add.
Dr Jiajin Chen at Xiamen University in China and his colleagues analysed data from activity trackers worn by middle-aged volunteers enrolled in the UK Biobank project. They first looked at 80,243 participants who did not have coronary heart disease. In this group, women who met the 150-minute weekly exercise target had a 22% lower risk of developing heart disease over eight years of follow-up, compared with those who did not. For men, the risk was 17% lower.
Further analysis showed that women could reduce their heart disease risk by 30% through exercising for 250 minutes a week, a benefit men only achieved on reaching 530 minutes of physical activity each week.
The most striking result emerged from data on more than 5,000 men and women who already had coronary heart disease. Here, the researchers found that the risk of dying during the follow-up period was three times lower for women who met the weekly exercise target than for similarly active men.
Prof Yan Wang, a senior author on the paper, said the work showed both sexes could gain “substantial cardiovascular benefits” from physical activity and recommended everyone, regardless of their sex, to take regular exercise.
But he added that, globally, more women than men were not meeting physical activity targets. “We particularly hope that our findings could encourage physically inactive females to become more active, thereby reducing their cardiovascular risk,” he said.
It is unclear why exercise may benefit women more than men, but scientists point to differences in sex hormones, muscle fibres and the ability to break down sugar to produce energy as potential factors.
In an accompanying article, Dr Emily Lau, a women’s cardiovascular health specialist at Massachusetts General hospital, writes: “This study provides further evidence that one size really does not fit all and challenges us to move from conversation to action. It is time to embed sex-specific strategies into guidelines and to develop tailored interventions to optimise cardiovascular health for women.”
