Memorial Hospital researcher awarded $2.6 million grant to study exercise’s impact on women’s heart failure

Dr. Charles Eaton of Memorial Hospital is overseeing a broad-based new study funded by a $2.6 million grant. / COURTESY MEMORIAL HOSPITAL
Dr. Charles Eaton of Memorial Hospital is overseeing a broad-based new study funded by a $2.6 million grant. / COURTESY MEMORIAL HOSPITAL

PAWTUCKET – Thanks to a $2.6 million grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, Dr. Charles Eaton, director of the Center for Primary Care and Prevention at Memorial Hospital, and his colleagues across the country are leading the first and largest community-based primary prevention trial on the effects of exercise and strength training on heart failure in elderly women, who range in age from 66-92, Memorial Hospital announced.

The five-year Women’s Health Initiative Strong and Healthy-2 Prevent Heart Failure Study is an extension of the national, long-term Women’s Health Initiative, including a site at Memorial, which studied more than 160,000 women across the country. It will examine the effects of heart failure and the burden of the disease in women who were previously diagnosed with it. According to Eaton, nearly 50,000 women – including 200 in Rhode Island – have enrolled in the WHISH-2 Prevent Heart Failure study, with approximately half of them enrolled in the exercise arm of the study.

Eaton said the incidence of heart failure is more common in women and affects individuals as they age, when they typically exercise less and lose muscle strength and physiologic reserve. The goal of this study is to reduce sedentariness, he said. While the study’s written materials focus on moderate physical activity, such as walking, and adding strength training with light hand weights, phone and website advice is tailored to each woman’s present level of physical activity, adherence to an exercise regime and level of motivation, Eaton told Providence Business News. Even housework and gardening for women in their 80s and 90s might reduce their risks of heart failure. Previous observational research has demonstrated that even modest physical activity is preferable to a sedentary lifestyle, the hospital reports.

The WHISH-2 Prevent Heart Failure study will:

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  • Test whether older women who do not initially have heart failure avoid it by beginning a physical activity regimen, as compared with women who do not exercise.
  • Test whether older women with or without heart failure at the outset of the trial see a reduction in the disease’s burden, through hospitalizations and death, by engaging in physical activity, as compared with women who do not exercise.
  • Analyze the type, intensity and frequency of physical activity, including skeletal muscle strengthening, to determine if there’s a related reduction in the risk of heart failure and heart failure burden in the study participants.
  • All study participants have been recruited and randomized.

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