Running recommended to prevent heart attacks

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33189, 31 March 1973, Page 4

Running recommended to prevent heart attacks

A well-known sports medicine professor who helped train Finland’s Olympic Games gold medal athletes at Munich believes he has the answer to New Zealand’s rising death rate from heart attacks. He is Dr Kaarlo Hartiala, dean of the faculty of medicine at Finland’s Turku University. His prescription (given free) is simply 30min. running a day, and he takes his own medicine. Described by the famous athletics ■ coach, Mr A. Lydiard, as “the top man at his job in the world,” he says, “regular running will prevent heart attacks and can also prevent a man who has had an attack from suffering a second one.” He emphasises that the running should be sufficient to raise the pulse rate to about 150 a minute for 30min or more. But after a three weeks lecture tour of this country, Dr Hartiala said that New Zealand should have modern electronic equipment such as that used in Finland to prove this scientifically. He could not speak too highly of Mr Lydiard’s promotion of running for veteran age men. He said he was interested that a number of New Zealand doctors shared his views. One of these is Dr T. R. Anderson, the sports medicine advisor with the New Zealand team at Munich who said that “regular stamina training is the best means of preventing heart attacks.” And a consulting physician. Dr J. A. K. Cuningham. said “the fitter a man becomes by regular running and the further he is able to run the less prone he becomes to heart attacks.” Dr Hartiala pointed out that his home university at Turka had modern equip-

ment to scientifically prove these opinions correct. This is done mainly, he explained to a meeting at the Chirstchurch Medical Centre, by testing fitness on an ergometer and at the same time measuring the capacity to take up oxygen. The ergometer can be either a pedal machine or a type of tredmill. The equipment determines how many millimetres of oxygen the body consumes per kilogram of body weight per minute of exertion. The computer then relates this data with the pulse rate of the heart and blood pressure before, during and after recovery from exertion. “New Zealand’s death rate from degenerative heart disease is one of the highest in the world and it. is important for this country to have this kind of modern equipment,” he said.

He discussed another test method—the cinegram—in which coloured fluid is pumped through the vessels in the heart muscle and then photographed by X-ravs to determine the degree of blockage in the arteries. “This is a too sophisticated method of testing and quite unnecessary to find out if a man is free from risk of heart attacks,” he said. He emphasised that smoking, and obesity, high blood pressure and diet and especially hereditary factors predisposed to heart attacks. He called smoking the “number one killer.” Dr Hartiala and Dr Anderson both emhpasised the main problem of how to prevent heart attacks was to induce men to do the training necessary to safeguard themselves.