@article{APS10015,
author = {Qin Lu and Sheng-ming Wang and Yi-xiao Liu and Hong Chen and Rui Zhang and Wen-hui Zhang and Yuan-yuan Zou and Jia-wei Zhou and Xin-yi Guo and Ying Zhang and Teng-Li Huang and Yu-hang Liu and Si-qi Zhang and Kyosuke Yamanishi and Hiromichi Yamanishi and Hideaki Higashino and Haruki Okamura},
title = {Low-intensity walking as mild medication for pressure control in prehypertensive and hypertensive subjects: how far shall we wander?},
journal = {Acta Pharmacologica Sinica},
volume = {40},
number = {8},
year = {2019},
keywords = {},
abstract = {Successful prevention and treatment of hypertension depend on the appropriate combination of antihypertensive drug therapy and nondrug lifestyle modification. While most hypertension guidelines recommend moderate- to high-intensity exercise, we decided to explore a mild yet effective type of exercise to add to hypertension management, especially in populations with complications or frailty. After comparing the short-term cardiovascular effects of low-speed walking versus high-speed walking for 3 kilometers (km) (3 km/h versus 6 km/h) in young, healthy volunteers, we delivered low-speed walking (low-intensity walking, 2.5 metabolic equivalents of task, METs) as exercise therapy in 42 prehypertensive and 43 hypertensive subjects. We found that one session of 3 km low-intensity walking exerted a transient pressure-lowering effect as well as a mild negative chronotropic effect on heart rate in both the prehypertensive and hypertensive subjects; these short-term benefits on blood pressure and heart rate were accompanied by a brief increase in urine β-endorphin output. Then we prescribed regular low-intensity walking with a target exercise dose (exercise volume) of 500–1000 METs·min/week (50–60 min/day and 5–7 times/week) in hypertensive subjects in addition to their daily activities. Regular low-intensity walking also showed mild but significant blood pressure-lowering and heart rate-reducing effects in 7 hypertensive subjects within two months. It is hypothesized that regular low-intensity exercise of the necessary dose could be taken as a pragmatic and supplementary medication for hypertension management.},
issn = {1745-7254}, url = {http://www.chinaphar.com/article/view/10015}
}