[HN Gopher] Five minutes of exercise a day could lower blood pre...
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       Five minutes of exercise a day could lower blood pressure
        
       Author : geox
       Score  : 34 points
       Date   : 2024-11-07 20:42 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.sydney.edu.au)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.sydney.edu.au)
        
       | data_spy wrote:
       | "Could" is an interesting choice of word. I know researchers are
       | cautious but that wording makes it meaningless.
        
         | ajkjk wrote:
         | Quite. "5 minutes of exercise a day could raise blood pressure"
         | is equally accurate.
        
           | Aurornis wrote:
           | The headline is about a study that showed increased activity
           | was correlated with decreases in blood pressure.
           | 
           | So, no, it's not equally accurate to say the opposite is
           | "equally accurate" unless we're playing pedantic games where
           | we ignore the study and pretend it's all just meaningless
           | words.
        
         | markerz wrote:
         | Somewhat related is Betteridge's law of headlines:
         | 
         | > Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by
         | the word no. It is based on the assumption that if the
         | publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would
         | have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a
         | question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or
         | not.
         | 
         | I like to swap out any of these maybe-headlines with the exact
         | opposite. It may help us, or it may not.
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
         | 
         | From the article:
         | 
         | > Just five minutes of activity a day was estimated to
         | potentially reduce blood pressure, while replacing sedentary
         | behaviours with 20-27 minutes of exercise per day, including
         | uphill walking, stair-climbing, running and cycling, was also
         | estimated to lead to a clinically meaningful reduction in blood
         | pressure.
         | 
         | Sounds like 5 minutes of exercise is where it has a
         | statistically significant measurable impact in blood pressure,
         | but 20-27 minutes is where it's a meaningful impact.
        
         | nuclearnice3 wrote:
         | Getting a little beyond the headline, we find they had people
         | wear blood pressure monitors and accelerometers and concluded:
         | 
         | > More time spent exercising or sleeping, relative to other
         | behaviors, was associated with lower BP. An additional 5
         | minutes of exercise-like activity was associated with estimated
         | reductions of -0.68 mm Hg (95% CI, -0.15, -1.21) SBP and -0.54
         | mm Hg (95% CI, -0.19, 0.89) DBP. Clinically meaningful
         | improvements in SBP and DBP were estimated after 20 to 27
         | minutes and 10 to 15 minutes of reallocation of time in other
         | behaviors into additional exercise. [1]
         | 
         | [1]
         | https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.124.0...
        
       | hertzian56 wrote:
       | some people just have a bad genetic soup and do exercise and diet
       | and such and still have hbp well beyond the numbers designated as
       | meaning "high" ultra high etc I didn't see any hard numbers of
       | reduction in the article either, I've read that smoking raises bp
       | by 5-10points which is largely marginal when you look at how
       | inaccurate most bp readings are. I'm skeptical in this selling
       | environment we live in that this isn't all just to sell drugs to
       | people for their whole lives, these are the same people who want
       | to decimate human populations btw
        
         | hombre_fatal wrote:
         | 5-10 points isn't marginal just because there is measurement
         | variance to account for. And just because there's variance
         | doesn't mean you can't fuzz out real numbers. It's like
         | thinking you can stop a timing attack with sleep(random()).
         | 
         | I'd be very skeptical of defending something like high blood
         | pressure. People do the same with high cholesterol. It's a
         | bunch of cope and wishful thinking that they're very different
         | from everyone else who gets heart disease, our #1 killer.
        
       | eemil wrote:
       | How much more evidence do we need, that exercise is good and any
       | amount is better than none?
        
       | warner25 wrote:
       | Tabata et al.[1] found in the mid-1990s that 2-4 minutes of
       | "high-intensity intermittent training may improve both anaerobic
       | and aerobic energy supplying systems significantly." This was
       | popularized as "Tabata training" 20+ years ago. I generally
       | believe that brief bouts of exercise can be very beneficial,
       | especially because they're easier to do consistently over the
       | long-term vs. more time-consuming routines. For a decade now,
       | I've just been running through my neighborhood most days for
       | 20-30 minutes (with some sprints mixed in) and doing one or two
       | maximal sets of pushups or pullups or barbell exercises at home
       | on a weekly basis. I know a lot of people who got really into
       | longer (e.g. 60-90 minute) gym routines but couldn't sustain it
       | for more than a few months, and then stopped doing anything.
       | 
       | [1] https://journals.lww.com/acsm-
       | msse/Fulltext/1996/10000/Effec...
        
       | ibzsy wrote:
       | Exercise has changed my life for the better. I'm not a fit-geek
       | but 20 minutes of light running really helps me clear my head
        
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