Are Running Shoes the Fountain of Youth? By Lauren Cahoon
ScienceNOW Daily News
12 August 2008
Couch potatoes, your worst fears are true. Running slows the breakdown of our bodies as we age, according to a new study. Even people who run regularly for only a brief time can reap the benefits of the activity, drastically improving the quality of their golden years. Running provides myriad benefits, helping keep the pounds off and improving overall health. But is there a downside? When the jogging craze started in the 1970s, doctors became concerned that the sport could lead to injury and arthritis in older people. Physician and rheumatologist James Fries of the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, believed differently. He theorized that if people started performing vigorous exercise, like running, in middle age or later, they would increase the number of years they would remain in good health and minimize the number of years they would be disabled and unhealthy--a hypothesis Fries dubbed "the compression of morbidity."
To test the hypothesis, Fries and his team have, since 1984, kept tabs on more than 500 runners over the age of 50, comparing them with a similar group of nonrunners. Every year, the study participants answer questionnaires about their ability to perform life tasks such as walking and dressing. The scientists also tracked the volunteers' health and recorded the cause of death for any who perished.
As expected, the running group was leaner and healthier, and fewer of them died of heart problems, the team reports in the current issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine. However, the benefits of the jog-happy lifestyle went further. Nineteen years into the study, 34% of the nonrunning group had died, compared with only 15% of the running group. Only 7% of runners died from infections, neurological disease, or cancer, whereas 19% of nonrunners died of those causes. The researchers found that even individuals who ran regularly for just a month at some point in their lives gained from the activity--although the benefits weren’t as large as for regular runners. The biological mechanisms behind these effects remain unclear.
To rule out the possibility that healthier people are more likely to take up running, the researchers say they made sure the control group was similar in condition and lifestyle to the running group when the study began.
"The take-home message is that it is never too late to adopt running or vigorous exercise into a regular routine," says Eliza Chakravarty, the first author on the paper.
Kinesiologist Mark Tarnopolsky of McMaster University Medical Centre in Ontario, Canada, says that the study is good news for regular runners and casual ones alike: "It's interesting that someone can go out and train 25 years ago and still have those benefits work for you later."
RSS Feed