Research Spotlight - Can Exercise Really Improve Your Immune System, Especially When It Comes To Covid?
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We recently brought you some good news on how walking done later in life (the eighth decade and beyond) has a positive effect on cognitive aging. It’s never too late! But does walking, or exercise in general, have any beneficial effect on your immune system? Sounds like it would, but let’s get a look at what the latest research findings have to say.
You’ve heard the advice: to stay healthy, stay physically active. Yes, doctors and other medical professionals have seen in their own practices that when their patients are physically active they tend to get sick with respiratory illnesses less often, and when they do get sick they tend to recover more quickly than those that don’t exercise. Surprisingly though, there has been little scientific research to validate those observations.
This is especially important to many people today, as we wrestle with the implications of a pandemic and a novel virus that may, unfortunately, be here to stay.
A new study (a meta-analysis) published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, looked at sixteen studies done on this topic that were conducted between November 2019 and March 2022. A meta-analysis is a study that analyzes the results of multiple studies and looks at the pooled data from all of them. This type of study is a very trusted source of information in the scientific and medical communities.
The researchers looked specifically at the association between physical activity and risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection, COVID-19-associated hospitalization, and severe illness and death due to COVID-19 in adults.
The results?