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(Circulation. 2005;112:624-626.)
© 2005 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorial

Accelerated Decline of Aerobic Fitness With Healthy Aging

What Is the Good News?

Philip A. Ades, MD; Michael J. Toth, PhD

From the University of Vermont College of Medicine, Burlington.

Correspondence to Philip A. Ades, MD, McClure 1, Cardiology, University of Vermont College of Medicine, Fletcher-Allen Health Care, Burlington, VT 05401. E-mail Philip.Ades@vtmednet.org

Key Words: Editorials • exercise • aging • physiology

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

	Introduction

 
As we get older, even if we are healthy, we become less fit. At the extreme, we become disabled and eventually die. Although this deterioration in physical work capacity is widely accepted, few studies have characterized changes in aerobic capacity across the age span. Instead, the majority of studies have utilized cross-sectional designs. These studies are limited, however, by selective survival—ie, older participants, as a group, are inherently healthier than younger individuals, as evidenced by their survival. Thus, the 5% to 10% drop in aerobic fitness per decade, defined from cross-sectional studies, may well be an underestimate.^1–6

See p 674

	The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging

 
The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging began recruiting healthy individuals into a long-term descriptive study in 1978.⁷ Subjects were screened at baseline for clinical heart disease. Screening included a symptom-limited exercise test supplemented by nuclear perfusion imaging in men >40 and women >50 years of age. The participants were predominantly white and college educated and lived in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area. Every 2 years they spent 2 full days at the Gerontology Research Center in Baltimore, Md, where they underwent medical, physiological, and psychological testing. Individuals without onset of clinical heart disease underwent maximal treadmill exercise testing on alternate visits. It should be noted that although elimination of individuals who developed clinical heart disease allowed the researchers to examine the effects of aging per se on exercise capacity without the confounding effects of disease, this approach almost certainly removed less-fit individuals from the analysis because poor fitness is a well-known . . . [Full Text of this Article]