People who exercise regularly had lower rates of hospitalization and death from Covid-19 in a study published recently in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Regular exercise improves overall health and healthier people generally have fewer serious complications with Covid-19 infections. Earlier research has shown an association between exercise and better Covid-19 outcomes. This latest study goes a step further and suggests that even people whose age or health conditions make them higher-risk have better outcomes if they are regular exercisers.
Higher amounts of physical activity were associated with lower rates of death and hospitalizations from Covid across nearly all demographics, says Jim Sallis, a public health professor at the University of California San Diego and co-author of the study. A very active 70-year-old still had a higher risk of Covid-related complications than did a similarly active 40-year-old, but the exercisers in both groups had hospitalization rates lower than those who didn’t work out.
The study used data from nearly 200,000 adult Covid-19 patients across the Kaiser Permanente network in Southern California. It asked patients to self-report the number of minutes of moderate exercise they did per week and analyzed the records of how many people in the study cohort were hospitalized, experienced deterioration, such as admission into an intensive-care unit, or died within 90 days of a Covid diagnosis.
“You don’t have to run, you don’t have to sweat, you don’t have to do anything except get up and go out for a walk,” Dr. Sallis says. “That’s what most people do, and we see how much protection they’re getting from that.”
The findings add to a growing body of evidence that physical activity provides several types of protection from severe illness.
Exercise improves the body’s immune response by mobilizing and redistributing immune cells that can recognize and kill infected cells, says Richard Simpson, a professor at the University of Arizona whose research focuses on exercise immunology and who wasn’t involved with the Kaiser Permanente study. Without exercise, viruses have more time to replicate inside our bodies, which can result in more severe symptoms, he says.
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Physical activity can also help reduce inflammation, the body’s natural immune response to damage or pathogens. Chronic inflammation has been linked to more severe Covid-19 outcomes, especially in the lungs. Cytokines, small messenger proteins that help regulate inflammation, are released during exercise.
The study data were collected from the beginning of the pandemic to May 2021, when vaccines were just starting to become more available and before more recent waves of Covid. However, the researchers believe the results of the study are still broadly applicable.
“Exercise is as effective as many of the drugs that we use and has no side effects,” says Jordan Metzl, a sports medicine physician in New York City who wasn’t involved with the study. “We want to get people taking it every day.”
Write to Alex Janin at alex.janin@wsj.com
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