We wanted to know if exercise can prevent a second vascular incident in people with at least one vascular condition and improve their quality of life. We also wanted to find out what impact exercise had on people living with polyvascular disease. This project is now completed and published. The citation for our publication is: The effects of exercise on secondary prevention and health-related quality of life in people with existing vascular disease: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials.Broderick C, Stewart M, Thomson K, Sellers C, Fenton C, Cowie J, Xu W, St Jean C, Charteris K, Nundy M, Vardhan V, Krishan P, Pistol J, Rodríguez L, Todhunter-Brown A, van Wijck F, Cameron S, Keerie C, Taylor RS, Stansby G, Mead G; NESSIE, NIHR Evidence Synthesis Scotland Initiative. EClinicalMedicine. 2025 May 9;83:103201. doi: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2025.103201. PMID: 40630612; PMCID: PMC12235401.You can read the full research article online or as a PDF document here: Document Broderick et al 2025 eClinicalMedicine (715.97 KB / PDF) What did we find?We included 280 randomised controlled trials involving 23,419 participants from 51 countries. We found that regular exercise (lasting 6 weeks or more) reduces the amount of hospital stays for people living with vascular conditions and improves their health-related quality of life. Most of the included exercise programmes provided mixed aerobic exercise that took place for more than 20 hours over 6-12 weeks.We concluded that supervised exercise is safe for people living with vascular disease but most of this evidence was focused on single vascular conditions so more research is needed with people living with polyvascular disease.You can read a blog summarising our findings here.ImpactWe presented our results to a national clinical audience about the effects of exercise in people with polyvascular disease during a National Stroke Session (17 September 2025). The National Stroke Sessions are a forum for discussing current research on various topics around stroke. You can find more information about these here.We also presented our results at the 20th Stroke Forum Conference in Aberdeen, Scotland (25-27 November 2025). You can read the abstract for this here (page 93) and view the poster. The image shows a section from the poster. The full poster is available to access below: Section from UK Stroke Forum 2025 poster Document UK Stroke Forum poster (442.23 KB / PDF) Earlier blogs are available explaining why we carried out this research.Click here to read a blog about the importance of this project.Click here for update one and update two. The protocol for this research project describes the methods we planned to use and can be freely accessed.The effects of exercise on secondary prevention and quality of life in people with existing vascular disease: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trialsPROSPERO registration number: CRD42024517019 Click here for links to social media This article was published on 2024-09-24
