The past matters when it comes to heart disease

Many people think that exercising is important when it comes to protecting your heart. They are right. However, exercise is not a magical cure for heart disease. People who exercise can still have heart disease. Unfortunately, this is a fact that many patients like to cite whenever they try to justify their unwillingness to comply to prescribed exercise.

Marathon runners can suffer from a heart attack, but that does not mean that exercise is useless. In fact, those unfortunate marathon runners would most likely have had their heart attacks much sooner if they were not exercising regularly. Regular exercise also results in improving your cardiac reserve, meaning if you survive a heart attack your heart will continue to function more effectively than it would if had you not been exercising regularly.

One reason active people still suffer from heart disease is that family and personal history still have a major role in heart health. If you come from a family where your parents and grand parents have all had heart attacks by the time they were 50, you are automatically at an increased risk for heart disease...even if you exercise every day. Again, exercise is still beneficial to your cardiovascular system, but it will not necessarily stop you from ever getting the heart attack that your genetics has preordained for you. Personal history is important too because if you have been significantly overweight from the time you were 5 until you were 35, you are still at risk for heart disease even if you suddenly train your way up to running marathons. Those 30 years of unhealthy living may have resulted in atherosclerotic plaques forming in your blood vessels that can rupture to cause a heart attack in your future and, unfortunately, they do not just suddenly disappear if you decide to become more active.

Heart disease is complex and there are many different factors that can put you at risk for a cardiovascular event. The point I am trying to make here is that exercising within reasonable limits will almost always decrease your risk for a cardiac event; however, exercising cannot guarantee that your heart will not fail you. So please, do not decide to ignore your doctor's request for you to be more active because you read about a man who had a heart attack while going for a jog. Instead, just mention your concerns and keep asking questions until your physician gives you an explanation that satisfies you.

Does Tiger Wood's platelet-rich plasma transfusion therapy work?

Tiger Woods, and apparently many other athletes, have tried platelet-rich plasma transfusion to accelerate their bodies' natural healing process to get themselves fit to play after injury sooner than normal. Platelet-rich plasma transfusion is used to heal tendon injuries, which are very common in both professional and amateur sports. The treatment involves collecting a patient's blood and removing his red and white blood cells so that only the plasma remains. This plasma, which is injected into the injury site, contains platelets, which release platelet derived growth factor (PDGF), which plays an important role in the natural healing process.

One of the reasons tendon injuries usually heal slowly is because they do not receive much blood; thus, very few platelets and PDGF ever reach the injured tendon. Injecting platelets into the injured tendon augments platelet delivery to the damaged tissue.

This article is a great introduction to platelet-rich plasma transfusion and also contains an interview with the physician who used it to treat Tiger Woods.

An important thing to note from the article is that we have not properly studied the effects of this therapy; thus, we cannot truly be sure that it actually works, nor can we be sure that it doesn't lead to some additional harm years after the injection is given. The article agrees that we need more research before we can state that platelet-rich plasma is a reasonable and effective treatment option for chronic tendon injuries.

Ice Water Recovery

Ice water recovery is a method of exercise recovery used by many elite athletes. UFC fighter, Tito Ortiz, and Jenna Jameson provide an example in this video.

A good discussion about ice water recovery and the scientific theory behind it can be found in this article at Shark Fitness. To be honest, I haven't gone through the sources cited in the article, but some of the logic doesn't make sense at first glance. For example, the article states that ice baths are thought to,

Constrict blood vessels and flush waste products, like lactic acid, out of the affected tissues

How does that make sense? The ice bath will surely constrict blood vessels, but how does it "flush waste products"? If the blood vessels are constricted, then the blood will have a harder time leaving the tissue. The blood transports the waste through your body, so if it can't leave your muscle tissue, the waste won't leave either.

Discrepancies like this make me very skeptical about the recovery value of ice baths. As the article says, most studies regarding ice water recovery offer inconclusive or contradictory findings. I would really hate to go through all that if it doesn't really help!