Healthy Lifestyle Is the Secret to Longer Life, Researchers Say

Healthy Lifestyle Is the Secret to Longer Life health club, Researchers Say

Not smoking, regular exercise, maintaining normal weight, and avoiding diabetes and high blood pressure seem to be the secrets of living to age 90, researchers say.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 5 million Americans are aged 85 and older, a number that will quadruple by 2050. As the population grows older, doctors should encourage older Americans to exercise and lead healthy lifestyles to cut health-care costs.

“Given the rising cost of health care, anything we can do to try and reduce disease and disability in the older years and reduce the cost of medical care is important,” Laurel Yates, a doctor of internal medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston said in her study published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The researchers followed 2.357 men who were part of the Physicians’ Health Study. The men were evaluated when they started the study at about age 72 and were surveyed at least once a year for the next two decades. Overall, 970 men survived to age 90 or beyond.

The research found that a healthy 70-year-old, who had never smoked, had normal blood pressure and weight and exercised up to four times a week had a 54 percent chance of living until 90.

Exercising and not smoking “can have great payoff not only in terms of adding years to your life, but making those years be of good function and less disease.”

Sedentary lifestyle reduced the chances of living to age 90 by 44 percent, high blood pressure by 36 percent, obesity by 26 percent and smoking by 22 percent.

Having three of these risk factors significantly reduced the chances of surviving to age 90 to 14 percent and having five risk factors dropped the chance to just 4 percent.

The researchers also found that genes determine about 25 percent of the variation in lifespan. Therefore, 75 percent can be determined by lifestyle.

“Smoking, diabetes, obesity and hypertension each are predicted to reduce life expectancy by one to five years, while higher physical activity may add up to five years,” the study said.

Being in a good shape could add as much as 10 years to a man’s lifespan, the study found.

Yates’ study was completed by a second study belonging to Dellara F. Terry, MD, MPH, of the Boston University School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center and colleagues, who studied 523 women and 216 men aged 97 or older.

Dr. Terry split the participants into two groups based on gender and the age they developed diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, dementia, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, osteoporosis and Parkinson’s disease. The findings showed that almost one-third of the survivors had developed these illnesses by age 85,health club but were not disabled by them. The study also reports that men had better mental and physical function than the female centenarians, which the researchers say is consistent with other studies.

“One explanation for this may be that men must be in excellent health and/or functionally independent to achieve such extreme old age. Women on the other hand may be better physically and socially adept at living with chronic and often disabling health conditions,” health club the authors write.