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Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Running causes heart attacks

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12% of marathon runners were found in a German study to have suffered heart atacks versus only 4% among  the age-matched control subjects.

This is important!  You have to read more about it on Kurt's blog here   and there . (Thanks for bringing this subject!).

It turns out that marathon runners not only carried more frequent traces of  past myocardiac infarction events, than the average age-matched population, but also had 62% more atherosclerotic plaque as showed in this research.  The true extent of atherosclerosis among runners is likely to be even higher than that, because the control group in that study wasn't random.  It was selected from among patients undergoing the same scan for symptomatic or suspected heart abnormalities.

Has there ever been a study on marathon runners using a diet other than high carb?

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4 comments :

JC said...

Could be that many start running to combat cardiovascular disease,hypertension,or blood sugar problems.I did.

Stan Bleszynski said...

Could be, or it could be their hypothetical unhealthy diet habits , both amator and professional athletes. "carbo-loading" practice is also popular among them, based on the theory that muscles are supposed to be running only on glucose. That is of course incorrect as we know now.

Another factors that springs to my mind is consumption of powder protein supplements of dubious purity and provenience (I mean unproven, untested), as well as possible steroid drugs usage to enhance muscular growth.

It is impossible to say which factor did it but whatever it was must have been the major contributor!

The only way to find out is to further examine those 12% of runners, who did have heart attacks, and figure out what exactly they consumed over the years.

Regards,
Stan (Heretic)

JC said...

http://www.slashfood.com/2009/10/21/the-sardinian-diet-wine-bread-and-cheese/
What do you think about the green zone diet especially Sardinia.

Lots of bread,cheese,beans,wine and meat on the weekends.

And plenty of cardio exercise but not running.

nellborg said...

There are some incorrect generalizations regarding this article and comments about it. First of all, there was an infarct pattern in only 5 of the 102 runners, i.e. 5%, not 12%. The other 7 runners had non-CAD "LGE" , and the number of controls with the CAD pattern was 2%. Furthermore, "Delayed enhancement of myocardial tissue is seen in many pathophysiologic scenarios:

Retention of contrast material by fibrous tissue
Increased extravascular space
Inflammation
Tumor neovasculature in primary and secondary tumors"

http://www.radiologyassistant.nl/en/4a3ff48cccc37

5% vs 2% was not statistically significant. All this article really said was that a group of half former smokers (51.8%), middle age to older, who ran 5 marathons in the previous 3 yrs weren't immune to evidence of CAD. Do we even know if the runners had a longer history of running than 3 yrs? Not a very good study - even for an observational study.