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Article snippet: If 50 men run 3,510 marathons over the course of three decades, will their heart health suffer or improve? A new study delving into precisely that question concludes that the answer is simultaneously reassuring and complicated, with long years of endurance training seeming not to harm runners’ hearts, but also not necessarily to benefit them in the ways that the runners themselves probably expected. Over the past 40 years or so, attitudes about the effects of strenuous exercise on the heart have whipsawed. At one point, many people believed that endurance exercise would be a panacea for heart problems. A 1977 report in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, for example, intimated that marathon running and a healthy diet would immunize runners completely against atherosclerosis, or the buildup of plaques in the arteries that is the hallmark of heart disease. But after some runners died of heart attacks, including, famously, Jim Fixx, the author of “The Complete Book of Running,” in 1984, many scientists, physicians and athletes began to worry that long-term, strenuous exercise might actually be bad for the heart. In support of that idea, a few studies in recent years have found that the hearts of lifelong male endurance athletes may contain more plaques or other signs of heart problems, such as scarring, than the hearts of less-active men of the same age. A small study presented at a recent meeting of the Radiological Society of America, for instance, fou... Link to the full article to read more