Running a marathon sounds impressive, but it always carries with it an underlying threat: could it be slowly wrecking your heart? A decade-long study published in JAMA Cardiology dug into that question and came up with what it claims is a definitive answer: nah.
In the study, which was published this past December and detailed in The Conversation by David C. Gaze, a Senior Lecturer in Chemical Pathology from the University of Westminster, researchers followed 152 recreational marathon runners for 10 years, regularly scanning their hearts before and after races to track any long-term changes. They didn’t find any major potentially dangerous degradation. They mostly just found some temporary wear and tear.
Immediately after races, the heart’s right ventricle, the one that pushes blood to the lungs, showed reduced pumping ability. But that went away within days. Over a longer stretch, the 10 years that the study took place, there was no sign of lasting heart damage.
Previous studies have raised some red flags based on blood tests taken after endurance events. A lot of runners show elevated levels of troponin after a marathon. That’s a protein doctors use to diagnose heart attacks. Seeing those numbers spike can look terrifying, especially in emergency rooms. But it’s all about context.
In healthy runners, these troponin spikes usually happen when a runner has no blocked arteries, has never had a heart attack, and has never had an abnormal scan of any kind. They have none of the conditions that lead to a heart attack, only this one elevated level of a protein that doesn’t mean much by itself. Imaging will show that the heart is just under some temporary stress, but it’s not injured.
The right side of the heart takes the biggest short-term hit since exercise raises pressure in the lungs. Several studies have shown that it’ll go away with rest. According to Gaze, there is no long-term data out there that suggests that stress accumulates into permanent damage for recreational runners.
For most recreational marathoners, the heart adapts rather than breaks. While being physically fit does not make you immune to heart ailments, the runner’s heart is more resilient than some have suspected.
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