Sedentary older adults can help lower their risk of heart disease if they start exercising, a new study confirms. Researchers examined data on more than 1.1 million people aged 60 and older without any history of heart disease who had two health screenings between 2009 and 2012. Most were physically inactive at the first screening, and almost four in five of these people remained sedentary throughout the study period.

Compared to adults who were continuously inactive, those who started exercising one to two times a week were 5% less likely to have events like a heart attack or stroke, during the follow-up period. When sedentary people started exercising three or four times weekly, their risk of cardiac events dropped by 11%, and boosting exercise from none to at least five times a week was associated with a 9% risk reduction.

"The most important message from this research is that older adults should increase or maintain their exercise frequency to prevent cardiovascular disease," said Kyuwoong Kim, lead author of the study and a researcher at Seoul National University in South Korea.

"While older adults find it difficult to engage in regular physical activity as they age, our research suggests that it is necessary to be more physically active for cardiovascular health, and this is also true for people with disabilities and chronic health conditions," Kim said in a statement.

Researchers used South Korea's National Health Insurance Service database to determine there were almost 115,000 cardiovascular disease events like heart attacks and strokes in the study population.

The link between increased physical activity and falling risk of cardiovascular disease in older people held true even for those with disabilities and chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels and type 2 diabetes, researchers report in the European Heart Journal.