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Health & Medicine for Senior Citizens

Fitness at Middle Age Leads to Lower Risk of Chronic Disease in Senior Years

Even study participants who died had fewer chronic ailments to the end

Aug. 27, 2012 - A new study declares that fitness in middle age points to less chronic health problems in later life. And, even those who died in old age, seemed to have less of these chronic ailments right up to the end. The study involved both senior men and women, older than 65, who were Medicare patients.

The study was published Online First by Archives of Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. But, the findings came with a caution flag waved in a commentary by Diane E. Bild, M.D., M.P.H., of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

The research was by Benjamin L. Willis, M.D., M.P.H., of the Cooper Institute, Dallas, and colleagues. They examined the association between midlife fitness and chronic disease outcomes later in life by linking Medicare claims with participant data from the Cooper Center Longitudinal Study, a large group of individuals who were examined at the Cooper Clinic from 1970 to 2009.

The study of 14,726 healthy men and 3,944 healthy women, with an average age of 49, when they entered the study, used eight chronic conditions (CCs) for the analysis: congestive heart failure, ischemic heart disease, stroke, diabetes mellitus, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, chronic kidney disease, Alzheimer disease, and colon or lung cancer.

In the present study, higher fitness measured in midlife was strongly associated with a lower incidence of CCs decades later, the authors note.

With a median follow-up of 26 years, the highest level of midlife fitness was associated with a lower incidence of CCs compared with the lowest midlife fitness in men 15.6 vs. 28.2 per 100 person-years and in women 11.4 vs. 20.1 per 100 person years, according to the study results. Age- and sex-specific quintiles of fitness were based on treadmill times.

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Fitness at Middle Age Leads to Lower Risk of Chronic Disease in Senior Years