Three studies link increasing life span with increasing exercise

Who wants to be 75 and in an old-folks home? Who wouldn’t want to be 85 and doing 85 percent of the things you did at 65?

What could you be doing today to make the latter more likely? For starters, exercise.

Last week’s column explained if you want to be healthier and feel better as you age you need to lift weights. The article’s premise promised that a well-conceived health-and-fitness plan that includes an ample amount of exercise where two or three workouts each week feature weightlifting can cause the hands on the clock of time to pause — often for significant periods of time.

But my premise may not be your premise. You may not assume that exercise is as essential to battling aging as I, so what follows are some recent studies that transform my premise into your proof.

If you fear you’ve done irreversible damage to your body by not doing any exercise between the time you quit little league and joined AARP, think again. Last March, JAMA Network Open published research done by the U.S. National Cancer Institute that found people who only began exercising in their 40s and 50s succumbed to cancer and heart disease at far lower rates than those who were inactive after their youth and remained that way.

Early death from cancer was reduced by 16 percent; by heart disease, 43 percent.

While these percentages should please those who are presently not exercising, those who have exercised since youth have not done so for naught. The same research revealed that those subjects reduced the odds of dying early from any cause at all by 36 percent.

When asked about this study, Dr. Sunny Intwala, the sports cardiology director at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said, “I tell my patients ... you don’t have to start running marathons at 55 to reap the benefits of exercise. [That] doing something is better than doing nothing, and doing more is even better than doing something.”

Within four months of JAMA Network Open publishing the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s report, The BMJ, formerly known as the British Journal of Medicine, shared similar findings produced by researchers at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

This study rehashed the health data on more than 14,000 men and women who were between the ages of 40 and 79 when they enrolled in the European Prospective Investigation in Cancer and Nutrition-Norfolk study that began in 1993. Follow-up assessments continued until 2016.

From this, lead researcher Alexander Mok, a doctoral researcher at Cambridge, and his colleagues found that those who went from being sedentary to doing what is considered the bare minimum of physical activity over a five-year period were 29 percent less likely to die from heart disease, 11 percent less likely to die from any type of cancer, and 24 percent likely to die from any cause prematurely when compared to those who remained sedentary.

Moreover, those who began the study highly active and worked out even more by the end were 42 percent less likely to die prematurely from any cause.

As a result of their findings, the authors believe that as well as urging everyone to engage in at least the bare minimum of physical activity, “public health efforts should also focus on the maintenance of physical activity levels, specifically preventing declines over mid to late life.”

In other words, aging is no excuse to cut back or give up on exercise.

Nearly two months after BMJ published the results of the Cambridge study, the journal put out another that also found a correlation between exercise and life span. This study analyzed the data accrued in eight others so that information on more than 36,000 adults who were at least 40 years old and followed for more than five years was considered.

The highlight of the study: The most active subjects were five times less likely to die early than those who were the least active. Another important finding: Those who reported sitting 9.5 hours or more daily had what WebMD called “a significantly increased risk” of dying prematurely regardless of physical activity.

So what are my suggestions in light of the recent research?

The need for the sedentary to start some sort of exercise routine is so plain to see I feel no need to stress that. Same for continuing to exercise as you age.

But if you do have a job that requires sitting for long periods of time, here’s something to consider: Getting up and moving about as often as you can.

It does more good than increase life span.

For instance, I do most of the writing for this column between 5-8 a.m. during the weekend. Generally, I’m riding the bike within an hour of that.

If I don’t take a break every 30 minutes or so and walk around, not only do I find my back, hips, and hamstrings tighten, but I also need more total warm-up time during the beginning of the ride.