Fight Aging!

For those people who are not participating in the obesity epidemic or otherwise sabotaging their prospects for long-term health, remaining life expectancy at any given adult age is slowly increasing over time. Each generation could expect to live a few years longer than the prior generation. We live in an age of technological progress in the life sciences, and so the state of medicine advances to ever greater capabilities, even given the ball and chain of excessive regulatory costs. That said, we do have the choice to live better or live worse, and those choices do have an impact regardless of the technological environment we find ourselves in. This open access paper puts some numbers to the long-term consequences of better versus worse choices when it comes to weight, smoking, and their other usual approaches to self-sabotage.

In this nested case-control study, individuals aged 80 years or older were evaluated, including 1,454 centenarians and 3,768 individuals who died before reaching 100 years. Individuals with the highest healthy lifestyle score (constructed from smoking, exercise, and dietary diversity) had a significantly higher likelihood of becoming a centenarian, compared with those with the least healthy lifestyle behaviors. Previous studies have reported that lifestyle factors were associated with life expectancy and/or mortality, but most of them studied the middle-aged or older age groups (aged ≥60 years), and few focused on people aged 80 years or older.

A healthy lifestyle score for 100 (HLS-100, ranging from 0 to 6), including smoking, exercise, and dietary diversity, was constructed, with higher scores indicating potentially better health outcomes. he primary outcome was survivorship to becoming a centenarian by 2018 (the end of follow-up). Information on sociodemographic characteristics, lifestyle factors, and other covariates was collected.

During a median follow-up of 5 years, 373 of 1,486 individuals among the lowest HLS-100 (0-2) group and 276 of 851 individuals among the highest HLS-100 (5-6) group became centenarians. The adjusted odds ratio (AOR) comparing the highest vs the lowest HLS-100 groups was 1.61. An association was noted when we further treated centenarians with relatively healthy status as the outcome, as evaluated by self-reported chronic conditions, physical and cognitive function, and mental wellness (AOR, 1.54). Adhering to a healthy lifestyle appears to be important even at late ages, suggesting that constructing strategic plans to improve lifestyle behaviors among all older adults may play a key role in promoting healthy aging and longevity.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.17931