Exercise increased the growth of new muscle cells and blood vessels in the weakened muscles of people with heart failure, according to two new studies
Exercise increased the growth of new muscle cells and blood vessels in the weakened muscles of people with heart failure, according to two new studies. "If you have heart failure, exercise training can improve your health status, increase your ability to exercise and reverse patterns of muscle damage that are common in heart failure," said Axel Linke, M.D., assistant professor of medicine at the University of Leipzig, Germany, and a co-author on both studies. In chronic heart failure, the heart can't pump enough blood to other organs in the body. "In addition to getting out of condition because it becomes difficult to exercise, people with heart failure have cellular-level changes in their muscles that make them weaker, more prone to fatigue, and in later stages results in actual muscle shrinkage," he said. In one study (abstract 3797), researchers investigated whether exercise training could activate progenitor cells, a pool of immature cells in skele...