Saco-Ledo G, Valenzuela PL, Ramírez-Jiménez M, et al. - Both medicated and nonmedicated hypertensive adults showed a reduction of ambulatory blood pressure (BP), over 24 hours, following a single bout of acute aerobic exercise.

• This is a systematic review and meta-analysis of 37 crossover randomized controlled trials (n=822) examining the short-term impacts of acute exercise on ambulatory BP in hypertensive people vs non-exercise control conditions.

• Following a single acute exercise bout, reductions were evident in 24-hour (systolic BP, −1.6 mm Hg for all exercise modalities combined; diastolic BP, −1.0 mm Hg), daytime (−3.1 mm Hg; -2.0 mm Hg), and nighttime ambulatory BP (−1.8 mm Hg; −1.5 mm Hg), respectively.

• Both the medicated and nonmedicated patients seemed to have similar magnitude of the effect.

• Separate analyses for exercise modalities revealed that aerobic exercises decreased all ambulatory BP measures yet with no significant impacts for resistance or integrated (aerobic and resistance) exercise for any ambulatory BP measure.

• The largest impacts were conferred by vigorous aerobic exercise.