By: Maayan S. Heller for Wounds1Exercise is good for your heart. Exercise is good for managing your weight. Exercise is good for increasing your energy level. And, it turns out, exercise is also good for your cuts and gashes.
A new study by a team at Ohio State University found that in older adults, regular exercise can speed up the wound-healing process by as much as 25 percent. These results represent the first time that research has tied exercise to this kind of physical enhancement.
| Learn More |
Increasing Your Activity – Easily
The results of this study support the advice of medical experts who recommend exercise for lots of health benefits. The exercise regimen that was used in this study could be easily followed by most older adults:
10 minutes of warm-up floor exercises and stretching
30 minutes of pedaling on a stationary bike
15 minutes on the treadmill, either walking briskly or jogging
15 minutes of strength training
5 minutes of cool-down exercises
Talk to your doctor, or a trainer at your local gym, for specific exercise suggestions that can work for you.
|
This is great news for seniors too, since the body's ability to heal even small wounds decreases as we age.“We set out to conduct an exercise intervention among older adults,” says Dr. Charles Emery, a professor of Psychology at Ohio State University and lead researcher on the study.
“Prior studies,” he explains, “had found that the stress of caregiving among older adults was associated with impaired wound healing,” and added that he and his associates believed it was likely those individuals were not exercising much, and at the same time from a physiological standpoint, that exercise would have a beneficial effect.
The study included 28 healthy adults ranging from 55 to 77 years of age (the average age was 61), none of whom had exercised regularly for at least six months leading up to the study. For the study, 13 participants exercised three times a week for three months. The other 15 didn’t change their physical activity habits during the study period and served as controls.
Everyone in the study was given a small cut, about 1/8-inch deep and across, on the back of his/her upper arm. The researchers then took pictures of the wounds three times a week until they couldn’t be seen anymore – this took around six to seven weeks for both the exercise and control group.
Dr. Emery says they made the wounds as close to identical as possible for the study, and added, “We would like to think that our results would generalize to other types of wounds – surgical or accidental.”
Likewise, the “intervention” kept the kind of exercise consistent. Workout sessions involved about an hour of aerobic exercise (stretching, pedaling on a stationary bike, and either jogging or brisk walking on a treadmill) and about 15 minutes of strength training. The focus, though, was on the aerobic/cardiovascular exercise.
“We believe that aerobic exercise is the easiest way to increase physical activity levels sufficiently to bring about changes in blood chemistry that would improve wound healing,” explains Dr. Emery.
So did the intervention work?
Well, yes. It seems that exercise does speed up the wound healing process.
At the end of the study, the research team found the skin wounds in the group that exercised healed an average of 10 days faster (29 days to heal) than in the group that didn’t exercise (39 days).
It seems exercise gives your body that extra push it needs when you need to be fixed up.
“Exercise seems to enhance regulation of inflammatory processes and hormones that are important to the wound healing process,” says Dr. Emery. This study focused particularly on levels of a stress hormone, Cortisol, during that process.
“We believed that one mechanism by which exercise may enhance wound healing is via reduction in stress, which in turn, is associated with enhanced immune function,” explains Dr. Emery.
The next step in the team’s research will be to determine if older adults who report greater stresses in their lives – like dealing with financial troubles or the death of a spouse – get the same benefit from exercise.
What did the intervention prove?
The results of this study may likely have important implications for treatment of older adults with skin wounds, but more importantly, they support the value of physical activity.
Most simply, this study is just “one more good reason for older adults to exercise,” says Dr. Emery.
So even if strengthening your heart or managing your weight weren’t good enough reasons to do it, maybe the added bonus of getting rid of unsightly cuts faster will help get more people moving.
