Exercise for secondary prevention and quality of life in people with existing vascular disease

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.
We have now completed and published this research.

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 open as a PDF document here: 

 

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

You can learn more by reading our earlier blogs describing why we carried out this research.

Click here to read a blog about 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 trials

PROSPERO registration number: CRD42024517019

 

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