Exercise may benefit women’s hearts more than men’s hearts

Do some people benefit more from exercise than others? A He studies Published on October 27 Nature cardiovascular research He finds that women may have an advantage over men when it comes to heart health.

Researchers in China analyzed data from 85,000 people without heart disease who were enrolled in the UK Biobank, a dataset that tracks participants’ physical activity levels using accelerometers and records heart events and deaths over an average of seven years.

Women who met the World Health Organization and American Heart Association’s exercise guidelines — 175 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous activity, or 75 minutes per week of vigorous activity — had a 22% lower risk of heart disease than those who did not meet the guidelines, while men had a 17% lower risk.

Additional analysis showed that women were able to reduce their risk of heart disease by doing lower amounts of exercise than men. To reduce the risk by 30%, men had to exercise for 530 minutes per week, while women had to be physically active for only 250 minutes per week, about half the amount.

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“We are quite surprised that females achieved cardiovascular benefits similar to those of males with only about half” of physical activity, says JiaJin Chen, a researcher at the Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases at Xiamen University Cardiovascular Hospital, who led the study. Furthermore, women who did the recommended amount of exercise “saw a striking three-fold reduction in their risk of death compared to males.”

Dr. Emily Lau, director of women’s heart health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Heart and Vascular Institute, wrote an article Comment About the results and their implications. “Women seem to have an advantage in physical activity,” she says. “However, we see time and time again that women are less physically active and less likely to meet recommended physical activity goals. This highlights an opportunity for the medical community to think about how we can tailor our recommendations to women. Because what we are doing now is not completely working.”

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The findings represent a starting point for additional studies to understand why women benefit from exercise more than men, even in smaller amounts. While the study did not explore possible explanations for the results, Chen says scientists have some theories. First, women have higher estrogen levels than men, and before menopause, estrogen may protect cardiovascular health — which may partly explain why women tend to develop heart disease at a later age than men. Trials also show that men who take estrogen supplements can improve their coronary heart disease because it helps break down fat during exercise. There are also differences in muscle structure between men and women and in muscle metabolism.

Chen did not analyze whether menopause, after which women’s estrogen levels decline, led to any differences in the exercise benefits women achieved. However, the women participating in the study were generally older — and likely past menopause — with an average age of nearly 62 years. The number of premenopausal women was too small to make a reliable comparison.

Based on the findings, Chen says, “Our findings provide valuable evidence for sex-specific coronary heart disease prevention through the use of wearable devices.” “We believe that in the era of personalized medicine, future interventions will increasingly be tailored to individual characteristics to maximize cardiovascular benefits.”

Lau agrees: “We have to stop treating men and women equally,” Lau says. “It’s 2025, and we’re still doing the same things where we’re taking data from men and extrapolating it to women. We see studies that tell us that men and women are different, and yet their guidelines are all the same.”