Lead author Huseyin Naci, MHS, a DPM research fellow in Pharmaceutical Policy Research, and his colleague from Stanford University School of Medicine conducted a meta-analysis of over 300 randomized controlled trials that compared the effectiveness of exercise and drug interventions and involved over 330,000 individuals.
In this systematic review, the researchers compared the effectiveness of exercise versus drugs on mortality across four conditions: rehabilitation of stroke, treatment of heart failure, prevention of diabetes, and secondary prevention of coronary heart disease (i.e., treating patients with existing disease before it causes significant illness).
Results showed no statistically-significant differences between exercise and drug interventions for secondary prevention of heart disease and prevention of diabetes.
Physical activity interventions were more effective than drug treatment among stroke patients; for heart failure, diuretic drugs were more effective than exercise and all other types of drug treatment.
The authors note that there is a scarcity of data on the mortality benefits of exercise as compared to that of drugs, and this may have had an impact on their results. However, they believe available evidence suggests that exercise and many drug interventions may frequently be similar in terms of their mortality benefits in the health conditions studied.