The red double-decker buses that are symbolic of the city of London have an altogether different significance if you study heart disease. Sixty years ago, these iconic buses helped a Scottish medical doctor named Jerry Morris discover the link between physical activity and heart attacks.
The buses offered a perfect way to study the puzzle of what was behind an epidemic of coronary heart disease that arose in developed countries after the Second World War.
Researchers could compare two groups of people who came from similar backgrounds and who worked in the same environment. The only difference was that London bus drivers sat all day, driving their buses. Their conductor colleagues spent their workdays walking the length of the bus and climbing up and down the double decker stairs, sometimes climbing 750 steps a day.
Six decades after Morris’s ground-breaking work, his findings are medical gospel. Exercise is good for you, and can drastically cut deaths from heart disease. But what if you are elderly?
In 1953, Morris and his colleagues published their first findings in the British medical journal The Lancet. Bus drivers, the researchers found, were twice as likely to die from heart disease as conductors. The same pattern held true in mail carriers, dockworkers, office workers and more.
Six decades after Morris’s ground-breaking work, his findings are medical gospel. Exercise is good for you, and can drastically cut deaths from heart disease. But what if you are elderly?
Dorthe Stensvold, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Cardiac Exercise Research Group (CERG) tells you how CERG tries to figure out how exercise can help the growing numbers of people 70 and older live longer and better.