We are delighted to be sharing news of our latest systematic review which has recently been published in eClinical Medicine. You can find the full text within this link, but in the meantime, read on for some highlights.

Why did we conduct this review?

We wanted to find out if the use of exercise can reduce the risk of someone experiencing further vascular disease. Our first blog provides more information on what vascular disease is and why exercise is important.

Previous reviews and guidelines used by health services tend to focus on people who have single conditions (such as stroke or heart failure) but in practice, people can present with multiple conditions that impact their arteries (called polyvascular disease). We wanted to find out what impact exercise had on people living with polyvascular disease.

What did we do?

We searched for existing evidence within Cochrane reviews, electronic databases and trial registries. Our second blog provides more information on this process and the large number of studies we looked at. We extracted data from the included studies and combined these within new analyses called meta-analyses.

We also worked with different groups of people including those with lived experience, clinical staff and those representing charities. They provided invaluable help with the review process, which included decision making when applying our inclusion criteria and helping us to interpret the findings.

What did we find out?

We found that regular exercise (lasting 6 weeks or more) reduces the amount of hospital stays for people living with vascular conditions and improves their health-related quality of life. Most of the exercise programmes included provided mixed programmes of aerobic exercise that took place for more than 20 hours over 6-12 weeks.

We included 280 randomised controlled trials involving 23,419 participants from 51 countries. We concluded that supervised exercise is safe for people living with vascular disease but most of this evidence was focused on single vascular conditions so more research is needed with people living with polyvascular disease.

Blog by Dr Katie Thomson

The effects of exercise on secondary prevention and health-related quality of life in people with existing vascular disease: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials / NESSIE - NIHR Evidence Synthesis Scotland InitiativE by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0