You know exercise is great for your cardiovascular health, but new research suggests that your brain has a lot to do with it.
It’s all about physical activity’s ability to lower stress levels within the brain, explained a team at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston.
Bolstering that finding, their study found that exercise brought the greatest heart benefits to people with histories of depression.
“Physical activity was roughly twice as effective in lowering cardiovascular disease risk among those with depression,” noted study lead author Dr. Ahmed Tawakol. He’s an investigator and cardiologist in the Cardiovascular Imaging Research Center at MGH.
The study was published Monday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
In the research, Tawakol’s team looked at a median 10 years of data on more than 50,000 people enrolled in the Mass General Brigham Biobank database. All of the participants kept records of their physical activity.
A subset of 774 also underwent brain scans and other tests measuring their stress-linked brain activity.