A new study highlights just how important exercise and physical fitness is among people with stable coronary artery disease. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Henry Ford Hospital discovered that higher levels of physical fitness not only lower the risk of heart attack but increase overall survival in those with coronary artery disease, regardless of whether or not they have had a procedure to open up blocked arteries.

“In our study, the patients who were most fit had a 75 percent lower risk of dying from any cause compared to those who were least fit. This was true regardless of whether the patient had previous stenting or bypass surgery to open up any blocked arteries,” says lead author Rupert Hung, a medical student at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Hung presented these findings through a poster presentation titled “The Prognostic Value of Exercise Capacity in Patients with Non-Revascularized and Revascularized Coronary Artery Disease: The FIT Project,” at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions in Dallas, Texas on November 17.

The study included information on over 9,800 adults who had been previously diagnosed with coronary artery disease. All of the patients in the study had been referred by a physician to undergo a treadmill stress test and were followed for an average of 11 years to see whether they had suffered a heart attack, undergone a revascularization procedure to restore blood flow, or had died from any cause.

“We measured exercise capacity, expressed as metabolic equivalents, or METS, from the patients’ stress test results. We found that each 1-MET increase in a person’s exercise capacity was associated with a 13 percent reduction in risk of death, regardless of whether they had previously had a procedure to open a blocked artery,” says co-investigator John W. McEvoy, M.B., B.Ch., a cardiology fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The researchers from this study say their findings show how important physical activity and fitness among people with coronary artery disease really is.

“Improving and maintaining fitness should be a high priority for patients,” says senior author Michael Blaha, M.D., M.P.H., an assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a cardiologist with the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Heart Disease.

“Our results suggest that increasing physical fitness through cardiac rehabilitation programs and exercise may be an effective supplement to medications for preventing complications associated with coronary artery disease. We hope that as a result of this study, more physicians will consider prescribing physical activity as a front-line therapy to improve survival and quality of life for their patients who are able to safely exercise,” says Blaha.