Exercise may be ‘as effective’ as drugs for treating common diseases

Click here to read this article by Loren Grush of FoxNews. Maybe if people exercised more we would need less government in terms of paying for drugs. Excerpts:

"In a study published in the British Medical Journal, researchers from the London School of Economics, Harvard Medical School and Stanford University School of Medicine were interested in comparing the benefits of both exercise and drugs from past clinical trials, to see how they measured up in terms of extending a person’s mortality.

“What we have is a body of research that looks at benefits of exercise alone and then a separate body of research that looks at benefits of drugs on their own,” lead researcher Huseyin Naci, a researcher at the London School of Economics and a pharmaceutical policy research fellow at the Harvard Medical School, told FoxNews.com. “There’s never been a study that compares these two together, so that’s the rationale for this research.”

Naci and his team looked at four areas of health where evidence has shown that exercise can have lifesaving benefits: secondary prevention of heart disease, stroke rehabilitation, treatment of heart failure and prevention of diabetes.

Researchers then compiled a list of the different classes of drugs people commonly take to manage these conditions, and ultimately came up with 305 randomized clinical trials to analyze.  The study involved 339,274 people, 15,000 of whom received physical intervention for their health conditions while the rest were included in drug trials.

Overall, the researchers saw no significant difference between exercise and drug intervention for the secondary prevention of heart disease and the prevention of diabetes.  And in the case of stroke patients, exercise was found to be more effective than drug treatment at extending a person’s mortality."