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Exercising In Polluted Air Can Increase Health Risks

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The Associated Press

Published: September 13, 2007

People with heart disease may want to steer clear of heavy traffic when exercising or simply take their workout indoors to avoid breathing polluted air.

Exercising in areas with high levels of diesel exhaust and microscopic soot particles is especially risky for people with heart disease, according to the first study in which heart patients were directly exposed to pollution.

European researchers found that brief exposure to diluted diesel exhaust during exercise reduced a key anticlotting substance in the blood and worsened exercise-induced ischemia, or insufficient flow of blood and oxygen to the heart - changes that can trigger a heart attack or death.

'We now have evidence that being exposed to diesel fuel during exercise will cause cardiac ischemia and that if you have heart disease, it can only make things worse,' said Abraham Sanders, a lung specialist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital not involved in the study.

The results have big implications: About 16 million Americans have heart disease, according to the American Heart Association. In addition, people with asthma, bronchitis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease also should use caution and avoid polluted air when exercising, Sanders recommended. But heart and respiratory patients should keep exercising regularly because it is so beneficial to overall health, doctors stress.

Numerous studies have shown a link between short-term and long-term exposure to air pollution and higher rates of hospitalization and death because of poor blood supply to the heart, abnormal heart rhythms, gradual heart failure and stroke.

This study adds to that knowledge about how air pollution harms people and aims to show what pollution is doing in the body, said Howard M. Kipen, director of clinical research at Rutgers University's Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute.

The European study was reported in The New England Journal of Medicine.

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