Cardiorespiratory Fitness Helps Aging Men Keep Their Blood Pressure Down

Staying fit is essential to overall health and well-being.

Now, recent findings published in the Journal of American College of Cardiology show that physical fitness is particularly important for lowering spiked blood pressure levels in aging men.

"Since regular physical activity is the primary and most modifiable determinant of fitness level, our results underscore the importance for a man to increase his regular physical activity to prevent his natural, age-related rise in blood pressure," said study co-author Junxiu Liu, M.D., PhD candidate, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, in a news release. 

For the study, researchers examined 13,953 men between the ages of 20 and 90 from the time period of 1970 through 2006. At the beginning of the study, the men did not have high blood pressure, heart disease or cancer.

The researchers collected information on the men's naturally occurring systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) hypertension from the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study. All involved completed three to 28 follow-up examinations. Fitness levels were determined based on the participants' performance on a treadmill exercise stress test.

Findings revealed that men who had higher levels of cardiorespiratory fitness delayed the start of rising SBP levels to the age of 54. For men who were fit, their levels of DPB did not reach prehypertension levels until around 90-years-old.

"Also interesting to note is that when we examined the percentage of body fat data, the systolic and diastolic numbers were not significantly changed these results support our hypothesis that a man's age-related blood pressure rise was independent of his percentage of body fat," Sui concluded.

Though researchers did not investigate this link it women, it certainly does pay to stay active.