PRAGUE, Czech Republic — Need some motivation not to skip leg day? Look no further. Researchers working with the European Society of Cardiology report that patients with especially strong legs are less likely to develop heart failure following a heart attack.
Myocardial infarction (a heart attack) is actually the most common cause of heart failure, with roughly six to nine percent of heart attack patients going on to develop a form of heart failure. Prior studies, meanwhile, reveal that having strong quadriceps has an association with a lower risk of death among patients with coronary artery disease.
For this latest project, study authors tested their hypothesis that leg strength does indeed have a link to a lower risk of heart failure post-acute myocardial infarction. This study encompassed 932 patients hospitalized between 2007 and 2020 with acute myocardial infarction. All of the patients did not have heart failure before entering the hospital, and did not develop heart failure complications during their hospital stay. The average age of these patients was 66 and 81 percent of the participants were men.
The team used maximal quadriceps strength as their indicator of leg strength. Patients sat on a chair and contracted their quadriceps muscles as hard as they could for five seconds, all while a handheld dynamometer attached to the ankle recorded the maximum value in kilograms.
The study performed this measurement on each leg, with researchers using the average of both values. Strength was expressed relative to body weight, which means that quadriceps strength (in kilograms) was divided by body weight (in kilograms) and multiplied by 100 for a percentage body weight value. The team then classified each patient as having either “high” or “low” strength depending on whether their value was above or below the average for their sex.
The average value for women was 33 percent body weight and the median value for men was 52 percent body weight. In all, 451 patients had low quadriceps strength while another 481 had high strength. Next, over the course of an average follow-up period of four-and-a-half years, 67 patients (7.2%) went on to develop heart failure. Heart failure incidence was 10.2 per 1,000 person-years in patients with high quadriceps strength and 22.9 per 1,000 person-years among patients with low strength.
The research team specifically analyzed the association between quadriceps strength (low vs. high) and heart failure risk. The analysis, of course, was also adjusted for a variety of factors known to have a connection to the development of heart failure after myocardial infarction including age, sex, body mass index, prior myocardial infarction or angina pectoris, diabetes, atrial fibrillation, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, peripheral arterial disease, and kidney function.
In comparison to low quadriceps strength, a high strength level displayed a connection to a 41-percent lower risk of heart failure. Study authors also analyzed the association between quadriceps strength as a continuous variable and the risk of heart failure. They found that each five percent body weight increment in quadriceps strength was associated with an 11-percent lower chance of heart failure.
“Quadriceps strength is easy and simple to measure accurately in clinical practice. Our study indicates that quadriceps strength could help to identify patients at a higher risk of developing heart failure after myocardial infarction who could then receive more intense surveillance. The findings need to be replicated in other studies, but they do suggest that strength training involving the quadriceps muscles should be recommended for patients who have experienced a heart attack to prevent heart failure,” says study author Kensuke Ueno, a physical therapist at the Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences, in a media release.
This research was presented at Heart Failure 2023, a scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).
You might also be interested in:
- 5-minute breathing exercise lowers blood pressure better than working out, medication
- Having fatter legs linked to lower risks for high blood pressure
- Beta blockers may be doing more harm than good for heart attack patients
Pure bullocks, basically if you are in decent shape you’ll be in a better position to survive. No evidence I saw that leg strength alone will do anything.
Do overweight people have stronger legs?
Interesting correlation that doctors could use to identity higher risk patients. But there is no evidence whatsoever that just exercising your legs would lower your heart failure risk. That’s a very silly corollary.
Tom Platz will live forever
If your quad strength were only 50% of your body weight, you would be unable to stand from a squatting position. This is absurd.
The great majority of people (especially age 61 and older) cannot stand, unaided, from a full squat position. Few people of any age can. They have to push themselves up from sitting position by using the chair arms, “steady” themselves by using a hand rail or other hold.
Further, many other muscles in the calves and gluteals provide strength for standing from squats.
Working in an (bank IT) office of about 300 people (70% male) on my floor, I doubt that 33% could do a full squat and return to upright position.
Tell that to Jim Fixx the author of The Complete Book of Running, oh wait you can’t because he died of a heart attack at 52.
The ignorance about statistics is amazing.
It does not say that quad strength prevents heart attacks, it does not say that there is a causal link between leg strength and heart failure, it says only that quad strength is a predictor for heart failure.
Of course, I believe that there is a link but this article does not prove it.
Hippocrates stated “Walking is the best medicine.” and 2,500 years later people are rediscovering the truth.
Some thousands of the best athletes in the world, professional and amateur have died, very publicly, in the last few years in spite of amazing fitness and quad strength even though they had been recently vaccinated. It doesn’t prove that the vaccine killed them, it doesn’t prove that the vaccine causes myocarditis, but you would have to be an idiot not to recognise a statistical probability of a link.