Efeitos da atividade física sobre a pressão arterial sistêmica de indivíduos hipertensos adultos

Abstract

According to the annual report on health statistic of the World Health Organization, one out of every three adults in the world suffer from hypertension. In Brazil the picture is not very different, because hypertension reaches22.7% of Brazilian adults. Studies in the literature have shown that regular physical activity in everyday life can be a good solution in preventing various problems, because their health benefits include reducing the risk of death from cardiovascular disease, reducing the risk of developing diabetes, colon cancer and breast cancer, and hypertension. Thus, considering the benefits that physical activity provides general health, and before an epidemiological alarming public health, it is proposed to evaluate the effects of physical activity on blood pressure in hypertensive adults, through a literature review which analyzed systematically original articles are available for free consultation on internet. The population consisted of all studies published in Portuguese, are available for free consultation in the database SCIELO in the period 2003-2012, and the sample is composed of all the articles published in this period showed that the relationship between physical activity an blood pressure. Among the selected articles, most studies (64.7%) were performed in the last five years and performed in South and Southeast, being who was not identified no studies in the northern. With regard to changes in blood pressure, 76.47% of the work found decreased BP, while 23.53% found no change in BP of the participants of the samples. Regarding the type of exercises, 85.7% of searches aerobic exercise observed the reduction in BP after the experimental treatment, versus 62.5% of searches with resistance exercises, pointing to a greater effectiveness of aerobic exercise on hypertension. From the data found in the search it is concluded that aerobic exercises seems to provide more benefits to the decrease in blood pressure, and hiking, among other aerobic physical activities, one of the main exercises to be practiced and recommended to hypertensive patients. As for resistance exercises, there is a need for studies to examine the long-term effects, since the period of treatment may not have been sufficient to provide improvements in blood pressure in some of the evaluated studies analyzed.