Effect of Aerobic Training on Blood Pressure in Hypertensive Patients: A Meta-Analysis Study

A low information is available concerning the effects of the training volume subgroups and also hypertensive patients’ characteristics (e.g. age, gender, menopause, medication use and etc.) on the amount of aerobic training induced decreases in systolic and also diastolic blood pressures. Therefore, this meta-analysis aimed to determine and compare the amount of blood pressure changes after aerobic training and also to separate the effects in between patients and training subgroups

Clinical trials (CTs) that investigated the effect of, at least, 4 weeks of aerobic training in hypertensive patients, published in a peer reviewed journals up to Aug 2018 were selected from Google, PubMed, SID and Magiran databases and included in the meta-analysis. Random-and fixed-effect models were used for analyzing the effect sizes were reported as difference in mean between 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of the respectively 20 and 21 studies concerned with SBP and DBP with I2 values less than 50% using CMA2 software. For each trial subgroup (gender, menopause, medication use, exercise frequency, intensity and duration, total weekly exercise time and study duration), statistical significance was tested by using one-way analysis of variance and a multivariate meta-regression analysis were performed to assess correlations between the participants’ age subgroup and the both SBP and DBP response to aerobic training.  

The overall pooled net effect of aerobic training on both the systolic and diastolic blood pressures were -8.72 mm Hg and -3.88 mm Hg (P=0.001), respectively. In spite of the significant effect sizes observed for all the trial subgroups (in exception for SBP in low intensity training and DBP in post menopause women), a significantly different SBP reduction was only observed among the three subgroups of the “study duration” category.

Aerobic training leads to a mild suppression of blood pressure in hypertensive patients regardless to the moderating effects from study subgroups (age group, gender, menopause status, and medication use or training dosage) with the greater reductions reported for eight to 10 weeks of training. However; a larger and longer term CTs still remains to be done because of a very large number of limitations in the conducted trials.