NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Elderly men can improve their chances of having an even longer and healthier life by quitting smoking, controlling their weight, getting their blood pressure and blood glucose under control and exercising regularly, a study shows.
But making such changes is, of course, easier said than done, Dr. Laurel B. Yates of Brigham and Women's Hospital, the study's lead author, admitted in an interview with Reuters Health. "Lifestyle factors are the hardest things to do -- it's much easier to take a pill," she said. Nevertheless, she added, the rewards will include not only longer life but healthier, well-functioning years at the end of that life.
While a healthy lifestyle is understood to lead to a healthier life, the issue of whether pursuing healthy habits matters as much among older people has been controversial, Yates noted. To investigate, she and her team followed a group of 2,357 men participating in the Physicians' Health Study to determine which factors were associated with living to age 90. The men, whose average age was 72 at the study's outset, were followed for 25 years.
Forty-one percent of the men lived to be 90 or older. Smokers were half as likely as non-smokers to reach their 90th birthdays, while being diabetic, obese, or having high blood pressure also boosted mortality. Men who exercised regularly were 28 percent less likely to die during the study.
At age 70, men who didn't smoke, weren't obese, had normal blood pressure, were free from diabetes and exercised regularly had a 54 percent chance of living for at least another 20 years. But among 70-year-olds who smoked, were obese, had hypertension and diabetes, and were sedentary, just 4 percent reached age 90.
The longer-lived men also had better physical function and mental well-being as they aged, and developed heart disease or cancer years later than their shorter-lived peers.
"It does seem that, yes, there is something a person can do to increase the probability that he will have increased life span and good years at the end of that time," Yates said. It's likely, she added, that the same would hold true for women.
"This study suggests that adherence to sound medical management and lifestyle management pays enormous dividends in life extension and probably substantial reductions of aggregate medical care costs," Dr. William J. Hall of the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry in Rochester, New York, writes in an editorial published with the study.
SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, February 11, 2008.
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