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Gentlemen, 5 Easy Steps to Living Long and Well
Mike Mergen for The New York Times FRISBEE,
ANYONE? Exercise is linked to living longer. By
NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: February 19, 2008 Living past
90, and living well, may be more than a matter of good genes and
good luck. Five behaviors in elderly men are associated not only
with living into extreme old age, a new study has found, but
also with good health and independent functioning. The
behaviors are abstaining from smoking, weight management, blood
pressure control, regular exercise and avoiding diabetes. The
study reports that all are significantly correlated with healthy
survival after 90. While it is
hardly astonishing that choices like not smoking are associated
with longer life, it is significant that these behaviors in the
early elderly years — all of them modifiable — so strongly
predict survival into extreme old age. “The
take-home message,” said Dr. Laurel B. Yates, a geriatric
specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who was the
lead author of the study, “is that an individual does have some
control over his destiny in terms of what he can do to improve
the probability that not only might he live a long time, but
also have good health and good function in those older years.” The study
followed more than 2,300 healthy men for as long as a
quarter-century. When it began, in 1981, the subjects’ average
age was 72. The men responded to yearly questionnaires about
changes in health and lifestyle, and researchers tested their
mental and physical functioning. At the end of the study, which
was published Feb. 11 in The Archives of Internal Medicine, 970
men had survived into their 90s. There was
no less chronic illness among survivors than among those who
died before 90. But after controlling for other variables,
smokers had double the risk of death before 90 compared with
nonsmokers, those with diabetes increased their risk of death by
86 percent, obese men by 44 percent, and those with high blood
pressure by 28 percent. Compared with men who never exercised,
those who did reduced their risk of death by 20 percent to 30
percent, depending on how often and how vigorously they worked
out. Even though
each of these five behaviors was independently significant after
controlling for age and other variables, studies have shown that
many other factors may affect longevity, including level of
education and degree of social isolation. They were not measured
in this study. Although
some previous studies have found that high cholesterol is
associated with earlier death, and moderate alcohol consumption
with longer survival, this study confirmed neither of those
findings. A second
study in the same issue of the journal suggests that some of the
oldest of the old survive not because they avoid illness, but
because they live well despite disease. The study
of 523 women and 216 men ranging in age from 97 to 119 showed
that a large proportion of people who lived that long and lived
with minimal or no assistance did so despite long-term chronic
illness. In other words, instead of delaying disease, they delay
disability. Dr. Dellara
F. Terry, the lead author and an assistant professor of medicine
at
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