How healthy are ultra-marathon runners? Very, according to a survey of 1, 212 active ultra-marathon runners by Martin D. Hoffman, M.D., from of the Sacramento Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and Eswar Krishnan, M.D., from Stanford University in Palo Alto.
Ultra-Marathon Runners Prone to Asthma, Allergies
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But they do suffer from asthma and allergies. The researchers found that over 25% of the runners experienced chronic allergies and hay fever while 13% experienced exercise-induced asthma. Within the past year, 64.6% reported an exercise-related injury leading to lost training days but no loss of time from work or school.
The most common exercise-related injury was to the knee with stress fractures reported by 5.5% of runners.
“As expected, the work demonstrates that, with the exception of asthma and allergies, ultra-marathon runners have fewer chronic medical conditions than the general population, tend to miss little time from work or school due to illness or injury, and make limited use of the medical care system, ” Hoffman and Krishnan conclude. “However, they have a small prevalence of serious medical issues that should be recognized by those providing medical care at ultra-marathon running events.”
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This is a fascinating development. In my practice we've seen similar outcomes with the revised protocol. The key differentiator seems to be patient selection criteria. Has anyone else noticed the correlation with BMI thresholds?
Great point. I'd push back slightly on the conclusion, the sample size in the cited study is too small to draw population-level inferences. That said, the directional signal is compelling and worth a larger RCT.
We implemented a similar approach last year. Early results are promising but we're still gathering 12-month follow-up data. Happy to share our protocol if anyone is interested.
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