Exercise Treats Chest Pain, for Free

A little exercise every day is more effective at relieving chest pain in people with heart disease than a common surgical procedure -- and it's cheap, German doctors reported.

They found that 88 percent of heart patients who used an exercise bike daily escaped having a heart attack, or other serious adverse events such as severe chest pain, over four years.

That compared to 70 percent of the men who got a stent -- a little mesh tube used to prop open a blocked artery.

"The study was too small to make a general recommendation, but it suggests that patients with coronary artery disease can get the same symptom relief by exercising as they could with PCI (percutaneous coronary intervention) and stenting," Dr. Rainer Hambrecht of the University of Leipzig, who led the study, said in a statement.

"In addition, those willing to spend their leisure time exercising may have fewer clinical events."

His team studied 101 men aged under 70 who had stable coronary artery disease, meaning they had clogged arteries but did not have serious chest pain.

Writing in the journal Circulation, published by the American Heart Association, they said all of the men had at least a 75 percent narrowing of one artery at the start of the study.

They were evenly matched for weight, cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, smoking history, diabetes and other cardiovascular disease risk factors.

Half were put on a supervised exercise program and half got the operation to put the stent in.

Men assigned to exercise worked out on stationary bikes for 10 minutes six times a day for the first two weeks, in the hospital. Then they were asked to exercise at home on their bicycles, pushing themselves to an established target heart rate for 20 minutes a day.

They were also asked to take part in group aerobics for one hour a week.

Both groups of men felt better and had less chest pain.

The men who exercised not only felt better, but they improved exercise tolerance and oxygen uptake -- meaning they got fitter.

Regular exercise has been shown to reduce the risk of type-II diabetes and certain types of cancer, as well as heart disease.

The intense exercise training cost an average of $3,429 for each degree of measured symptom improvement in the patients in the exercise training group, compared to $6,956 in the stent group, Hambrecht reported.