A new study reports that adopting healthier lifestyle habits can continually lower your risk of death, resulting in years of additional life expectancy. [1].
Eight brilliant people
Living a healthy lifestyle will help you live longer. Although this sounds trivial, it is important for geriatrics to quantify how much increased longevity is related to individual lifestyle factors. This was the subject of a new study published in the journal. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
This paper is based on the Million Veterans Program, one of the largest and longest-running population studies of its kind. This program contains vast amounts of information about the health and lifestyle of hundreds of thousands of U.S. veterans. Age- and sex-specific mortality rates were calculated using data from more than 700,000 participants, and life expectancy gains were calculated using data from more than 700,000 participants, and life expectancy gains were calculated using data from more than 276,000 participants who provided data on all eight selected lifestyle factors. estimated from a smaller subgroup of Absence of excessive alcohol consumption, restorative sleep, nutrition, stress management, social connectedness, and opioid use disorder.
middle and extreme
The main limitation of this study is that lifestyle factors were calculated as binary values. For example, smoking was recorded as 1 for those who had never smoked and only 0 for those who had ever smoked. Participants were divided into those who were able to get 7 to 9 hours of sleep a day and those who were not. Additionally, he was given an arbitrary upper limit on alcoholic beverages, which was limited to four drinks per day. The researchers designed a healthy diet based on whole foods, mainly from plant sources. They controlled for possible confounders such as age, gender, BMI, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, current marital status, and education.
The possibility of reverse causation, where people switch to a healthy lifestyle after accumulating health concerns, was addressed by a sensitivity analysis based on participants' disease history. Importantly, the results are stratified by gender, even though women make up only 7% of the sample. There are gender differences in life expectancy and certain aspects of aging.
Most participants had three to six lifestyle factors that lowered their risk at baseline. The population at the extremes was much smaller, with only 1.5% having all eight elements and only 0.2% having none of the elements. At baseline, participants with a higher number of risk-reducing factors were more likely to be married, more likely to be highly educated and wealthy, and less likely to be obese or of African descent.
Lifespan increased by 2 digits
Mortality rates varied widely depending on the number of risk-reducing factors. Veterans with zero factors had 70.2 deaths per 1000 person-years, compared to just 6.8 deaths per 1000 person-years for veterans with all eight factors, a reduction of more than 10 times. did. Importantly, the reduction in mortality risk was persistent and decreased with the addition of one more risk-reducing factor.
The individual factor that most significantly reduced the risk of death was exercise. Being physically active was associated with a significant 50% reduction in mortality for men and a significant 46% reduction for women. In second place was “absence of opioid use disorder,” a factor that influenced only a portion of the sample. This was followed by “I don't smoke” (35% of men, 30% of women), “I don't have any anxiety or depression” (33% of men, 29% of women), and “I don't frequently binge drink or eat” (25% of men). Ta. , 19% of women), healthy eating (23% of men, 21% of women), “7-9 hours of sleep” (22% of men, 18% of women), and “positive social interaction score” (15%) % for men and 5% for women).
How does this translate into years of life? For veterans without any lifestyle factors that reduce risk, the estimated life expectancy at age 40 was 23 years for men and 27 years for women. For those who adopted all eight dimensions, the average time for men was 47 years and for women it was 47.5 years. The gap between people with the healthiest and least healthy lifestyles narrowed with age, but was still quite large at age 50: 21 for men and 19 for women. .
This study has an interesting design that emphasizes both the importance of each lifestyle factor in reducing risk and the importance of adopting as many of them as possible. However, some design features make the results difficult to interpret. For example, large gaps between the effects of physical activity and healthy eating are rare and may be explained by the dichotomous nature of the variable and arbitrary cutoffs. As always, population studies are prone to confounding and can only show correlation, not causation.
Based on data on 34,247 deaths that occurred during more than 1 million person-years of follow-up of veterans, reduced risk of death was found to be associated with eight individual low-risk lifestyle factors. We found that comprehensive adherence to all eight low-risk lifestyle factors increased life expectancy at age 40 by 24.0% for male veterans compared to adopting no low-risk lifestyle factors at all. In 2017, they estimated that female veterans could gain 20.5 years more.
literature
[1] Nguyen, XMT, Lee, Y., Wang, DD, Whitbourne, SB, Houghton, SC, Hu, FB, … & Wilson, PW (2024). The impact of his eight lifestyle factors on mortality and life expectancy among U.S. veterans: The Million Veterans Program. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 119(1), 127-135.
