You can strengthen your immunity by exercising regularly, research suggests.
Getty/Witthaya Prasongsin
- Regular exercise can help your immune system fight infections, such as Covid-19.
- This idea is supported by a review that looked at multiple studies from 2019 and 2022.
- However, future studies are needed to support the current findings, the authors say.
When it comes to strengthening the immune system, people have been debating the positive impact of exercise for a long time.
But research investigating whether exercise actually strengthens the immune system, and in turn helps fight infection, was scant, until recently.
Last year, a review of 11 researchers supported this notion. During the pandemic, they analyzed data from nearly 48,500 adult patients and found that physical inactivity was associated with an increased risk of hospitalization for COVID-19.
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Regular physical activity boosts your immunity, they write, reducing your risk of getting sick and dying from infectious diseases by more than a third.
Now a more recent study, which also looked at risk factors for covid-19, has come to a similar conclusion: After reviewing 16 studies between November 2019 and March 2022, the team found that this positive effect extends to covid. -19. Their study included data from more than 1.8 million adults.
To date, Covid-19 has claimed the lives of more than 6.5 million people worldwide.
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“Our findings highlight the protective effects of engaging in sufficient physical activity as a public health strategy, with potential benefits in reducing the risk of severe COVID-19,” they write.
The findings were published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine last month.
Why the protective effect?
Our immune function is complex, and for decades scientists have been trying to figure out its basics.
In the 2021 systematic review, the researchers found consistent evidence across 35 trials that regular exercise led to elevated levels of the antibody immunoglobulin IgA, an arm of the immune system.
“This antibody coats the mucous membrane of our lungs and other parts of our body where viruses and bacteria can enter,” explains Professor Sebastien Chastin of Glasgow Caledonian University.
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Regular physical activity also increases the number of CD4+ T cells, which are another arm of the immune system. Your work is find infected cells in the human body and destroy themthus preventing a virus from spreading and causing serious illness.
It was already known that regular physical activity has a protective effect against the severity of respiratory infections, and that being active is associated with many beneficial effects on health. The value of this study, however, is that it finds that regular workouts are associated with a lower risk of serious infections, such as COVID-19, including hospitalization and death.
The latest findings are promising in that they could help guide clinicians and health care policymakers in developing guidelines that include physical activity, the authors say.
But, like the The New York Times reports, immunologists and infectious disease experts say we should urge caution when interpreting the studies. However, they agree that exercise has benefits for people’s health.
“Due to study limitations, our findings should be interpreted with caution,” the authors add.
