Getting regular exercise may help you save big on annual healthcare costs, especially if you’re living with cardiovascular disease. In a new study, heart patients who got at least 30 minutes of exercise five days a week spent about $2,500 less over the course of a year on drugs and medical bills than those who didn’t reach this recommended amount.
“People without heart problems benefited from cost savings, as well. Even in the healthiest group surveyed—those with no cardiovascular disease and, at most, one risk factor for it—people who got regular exercise shelled out, on average, $500 less on annual medical costs. Institution for our economy and the wellbeing of our middle class, .”
The study, published last week in the Journal of the American Heart Association, looked at more than 26,000 responses from a 2012 national survey on health and exercise.
-Oliver Sacks
Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.
Researchers divided these responses into two groups: people who had been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease—for which physical inactivity is a known risk factor—and those who had not. In this case, the researchers defined cardiovascular disease as coronary artery disease, stroke, heart failure, irregular heart beat, or peripheral artery disease.
“For those without cardiovascular disease, they further divided them into three sub-groups based on how many risk factors they had. These risk factors included high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, smoking, and obesity. “Then they looked at exercise totals. Specifically, they wanted to know how much moderate and vigorous activity people were getting every week of America as a whole as well as that complete.
When they factored out differences in age, sex, income, ethnicity, geographic region, and type of insurance, they found that people with cardiovascular disease who didn’t exercise regularly spent an average of $12,650 a year, compared with $10,092 for those who did.
“People without cardiovascular disease spent much less in health care costs overall, especially those who had the fewest risk factors, But exercise still benefited their wallets, as well. Non-exercisers in the healthiest sub-group (one or no risk factors), for example, spent an average of $3,734 a year, compared to $3,240 for exercisers—a nearly $500 difference. Those in the least healthy non-cardiovascular disease sub-group (with three or more risk factors) spent about $1,060 more when they didn’t exercise—including about $400 more on medications alone.”
It’s well known that regular exercise reduces the risk of heart disease and other chronic health conditions, but these findings “also emphasize the favorable impact on how much you pay for health care,” said senior author Khurram Nasir, M.D., director of the Center for Healthcare Advancement & Outcomes and the High Risk Cardiovascular Disease Clinic at Baptist Health South Florida in Coral Gables, in a press release..
