Exercising works

Not a surprise, but the study approach used by Kulaja et al. (2022) is interesting. They examine identical twins an examine how early adult exercise habits impact long term health outcomes. The abstract is below.

…monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs discordant for health habits provide an interesting natural experiment. Twin pairs discordant for leisure‐time physical activity (LTPA) in early adult life is thus a powerful study design to investigate the associations between long‐term LTPA and indicators of health and wellbeing. We have identified 17 LTPA discordant twin pairs from two Finnish twin cohorts and summarize key findings of these studies in this paper. The carefully characterized rare long‐term LTPA discordant MZ twin pairs have participated in multi‐dimensional clinical examinations. Key findings highlight that compared with less active twins in such MZ twin pairs, the twins with higher long‐term LTPA have higher physical fitness, reduced body fat, reduced visceral fat, reduced liver fat, increased lumen diameters of conduit arteries to the lower limbs, increased bone mineral density in loaded bone areas, and an increased number of large high‐density lipoprotein particles. The findings increase our understanding on the possible site‐specific and system‐level effects of long‐term LTPA.

The full study is here.