Get Well Sooner

To Speed Healing, Quit Squabbling And Hit the Gym

You may need to do more than keep a clean bandage on that cut you got a few days ago. In order to heal quickly, you may need to get some exercise and keep things happy on the home front.

Two studies about healing, published in November and December by Ohio State University researchers, concluded that maintaining an exercise regimen and reducing marital hostility may speed healing.

The trials were designed to measure the effects of two different behaviors on the body's ability to heal. Both involved inflicting study participants' arms with wounds, which were monitored as they healed.

The November study, published in the Journal of Gerontology, found that regular exercise speeded the recovery of sedentary older adults aged 55 to 77. The 15 adults in the non-exercising group healed in an average of 39 days; the 13 exercising adults healed in about 29 days.

The active participants took part in a three-month exercise program, consisting of a one-hour daily regimen of warm-up exercises and stretching, followed by 30 minutes on a stationary bike, jogging or walking, plus strength training. Those in the non-exercise group were told to maintain their sedentary routine.

Lead study author Charles Emery said the findings demonstrate "one more benefit of exercise." Exercise may simply lower stress, he said, allowing the body to heal more efficiently. But the results could also suggest that exercise triggers an enhanced immune system response, he said.

The December study, which was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found that "hostile marital behaviors" impede wound healing, according to the findings.

Forty-two married couples, ages 22 to 77, were admitted to a hospital on two separate occasions -- once to talk normally and a second time to discuss a disagreement. At the time of the visits, they were inflicted with blister wounds on their forearms.

Couples who had "consistently higher levels of hostile behaviors across both the interactions" healed at 60 percent of the rate of low-hostility couples, the study concludes. (Some couples fought unprompted during the first visit.)

Wounds in the marital study "took a day longer . . . to heal [after couples argued] than it did when they weren't fighting," said Ron Glaser, co-author of the study and director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at Ohio State.

The results suggest "these kinds of things that take place at home could have implications for surgery down the road sometime in life," he said.

Because the exercise findings are preliminary and the wounds tested were minor, the authors don't know if the results are "generalizable to someone who has been in an accident or who has had surgery," said Emery. But it's likely that "the quicker someone gets up [and becomes physically active] following a wound of any kind, probably the better," he said.

Other wound care experts agreed. Wound healing, as a practice, is "pretty basic," said Richard A. Kelton, a specialist at the Wound Care Center at the Baltimore Washington Medical Center in Glen Burnie.

"You have to maximize blood supply to the affected area [and] you want to reduce swelling," said Kelton. "Anything that slows down oxygen delivery to an area," including stress or poor circulation, can impede healing, he said.

If future research confirms these findings, the benefits could be far reaching, particularly for surgical patients, Glaser said. "A person going in for surgery is going to be pretty scared, and they're going to be pretty stressed," he said.

Giving a surgical patient behavioral therapy or medication to reduce stress , he said, "might translate into some important outcomes associated with recovering," such as lower risk for hospital-acquired infections, a reduction in the need for pain medication or a reduced hospital stay.

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