#exercise and aging

The Science of Exercise and Aging: The Science of Sport Podcast

In the latest episode of the Real Science of Sport podcast, Mike and Ross tackle Aging and Exercise. Unavoidable, inevitable, aging affects us all, but exercise … source

To stay younger, stronger and smarter, who would not want to do that? Don’t you wish there was a pill or a portion from a bottle that could do that? 

I started my interest in lifestyle medicine over forty years ago for my personal benefit not really to help others. It was not until I realized after years of treating patients; it was like they were going through a revolving door. What was…

By Patricia Neighmond, NPR, December 10, 2018

We know we need to exercise for our health, but a lifelong exercise habit may also help us feel younger and stay stronger well into our senior years. In fact, people in their 70s who have been exercising regularly for decades seem to have put a brake on the aging process, maintaining the heart, lung, and muscle fitness of healthy people at least 30 years younger.

Take 74-year-old Susan Magrath, a retired nurse practitioner who lives in Muncie, Ind. Magrath has been running almost daily for 45 years. She often runs outdoors and describes it as addictive. “It’s just such a release, just a wonderful release,” she says. “I ran today and there were little snowflakes coming down and I was down by the river and it’s just wonderful and I think it’s become more of a contemplative meditative process for me.”

Magrath may be living proof that lifelong exercise helps with cardiovascular and muscle health. She recently took part in a study at the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University, also in Muncie, headed by exercise physiologist Scott Trappe. Trappe is among the first to study the enticing new population of lifelong exercisers.

After the running and aerobic boom of the 1970s, a large numbers of septuagenarians stuck with it and have been exercising regularly for the last 50 years. In this population, Trappe says, “we were interested in basically two questions: One, what was their cardiovascular health, and two, what was their skeletal muscle health?”

What he saw surprised him. “We saw that people who exercise regularly year after year have better overall health than their sedentary counterparts. These 75-year-olds--men and women--have similar cardiovascular health to a 40- to 45-year-old.”

“Exercise wins is the take-home message,” he says.

In the study, Trappe divided 70 healthy participants into three groups. Those in the lifelong exercise group were on average 75-years-old and primarily kept their heart rates up through running and cycling. They had a history of participating in structured exercise four to six days a week for a total of about 7 hours a week.

The second group included individuals who were also on average 75-years-old but did not engage in structured exercise regimens, although they might have participated in occasional leisure walking or golf.

The third group consisted of young exercisers who were, on average 25 years old, and worked out with the same frequency and length of time as the lifelong exercisers.

Although the study was relatively small, the findings, which were published in the Journal of Applied Physiology in August, suggest a dramatic benefit of lifelong exercise for both muscle health and the cardiovascular system.

“Lifelong exercisers had a cardiovascular system that looked 30 years younger,” says Trappe. This is noteworthy because, for the average adult, the ability to process oxygen declines by about 10 percent per decade after age 30.

“It’s kind of a slow decay over time that’s probably not so noticeable in your 30s or 40s,” says Trappe, but eventually as years go on, becomes apparent. People can get out of breath more easily and may have difficulty pushing themselves physically.

As for muscle health, the findings were even more significant, says Trappe. Trappe says researchers were surprised to find the 75-year-old muscles of lifelong exercisers were about the same as the muscles of the 25-year-olds. “If I showed you the muscle data that we have, you wouldn’t know it was from an older individual, you would think it’s from somebody that’s a young exerciser,” he says.

82-year-old David Costill was not part of the study but is a former colleague of Trappe’s and professor emeritus of exercise science at Ball State University. As an exercise physiologist, he has always known about the benefits of exercise and has been committed since high school.

He says he’s spent about “60 years actively exercising.” Costill ran marathons for about 20 years until his knees started to bother him, so he headed to the pool. “And I’ve been swimming for the last 35 years.”

When Costill looks at his friends, he says he finds he can do a lot more physically than they can. “If I’m out with a group of my peers, guys who are near 80, and we’re going someplace, it seems to me they’re all walking at half speed.”

Trappe says the findings are clear: Thirty to 60 minutes of exercise a day may be the key to a healthy life. But you don’t have to run marathons or compete in cycling events. “If you want to do 30 to 45 minutes of walking a day, the amount of health benefit you are going to get is going to be significant and substantial,” he says, “will it equal the person training for competitive performances? No. But it will outdo the couch potato.”

Dr. Clyde Yancy, spokesperson for the American Heart Association and chief of cardiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine says the findings suggest, “a lifelong investment in health and fitness appears to be associated with a really sustainable benefit out until the outer limits of life.”

Lisa Rapaport, Reuters, March 1, 2018

(Reuters Health)--Older men may face a premature death if they spend most of the day sitting around, but it doesn’t require a huge amount of exercise to increase their chances of living longer, a study in the UK suggests.

Researchers asked 1,655 men, all between 71 and 92 years old, to wear accelerometers for one week. The goal was to assess their activity levels.

Among a subset of 1,274 men without cardiovascular disease or heart failure who wore the accelerometers as directed, participants logged a daily average of 616 minutes of sedentary time, 199 minutes of light activity and 40 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise.

After following the men for up to six years, there were 194 deaths.

For each additional 30 minutes of sedentary time on a typical day, men were 17 percent more likely to die during the study, researchers report in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Every extra half hour of light activity, however, was associated with 17 percent lower odds of death.

“For those who are able, it remains a good idea to aim for at least 150 minutes each week of moderate or more intense activity, that is, activities that get the heart beating faster,” said lead study author Barbara Jefferis of University College London.

“Our results suggest that whilst moderate or more intense activity is best, for older men who are unable to achieve the target, doing even light physical activity is worthwhile for extending the lifespan,” Jefferis said by email.

Not surprisingly, researchers also found that men were about 40 percent less likely to die during the study when they got the minimum recommended 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise each week, compared to men who didn’t achieve that amount.

And the benefit was similar whether men got this total amount of exercise in brief, sporadic bouts of less than 10 minutes at a time or they exercised in longer bouts of at least 10 minutes or more.

“We found that as long as men accumulated 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity per week, it didn’t matter whether it was in long or short bursts,” Jefferis said.

The results add to evidence that any exercise is better than none, even if more intense activity is better, said Keith Diaz, a researcher at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City who wasn’t involved in the study.

“So, whether one walks for 1 minute at a time or 10 minutes at a time, any duration of activity at a time is healthful,” Diaz said by email.

As a youth you would have never thought long and hard about the aging process until maybe well into your 40s. Today, most researchers believe that the maximum lifespan of a human being is approximately 110 years. We have seen our life expectancy improve from 47 years in the 1900s to 75 years in 1990. This vast improvement is a result of improved sanitation, medical practice and antibiotics. While…

By Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, October 28, 2015

Almost any amount and type of physical activity may slow aging deep within our cells, a new study finds. And middle age may be a critical time to get the process rolling, at least by one common measure of cell aging.

Dating a cell’s age is tricky, because its biological and chronological ages rarely match. A cell could be relatively young in terms of how long it has existed but function slowly or erratically, as if elderly.

Today, many scientists have begun determining a cell’s biological age--meaning how well it functions and not how old it literally is--by measuring the length of its telomeres.

For those of us who don’t know every portion of our cells’ interiors, telomeres are tiny caps found on the end of DNA strands, like plastic aglets on shoelaces. They are believed to protect the DNA from damage during cell division and replication.

As a cell ages, its telomeres naturally shorten and fray. But the process can be accelerated by obesity, smoking, insomnia, diabetes and other aspects of health and lifestyle.

In those cases, the affected cells age prematurely.

However, recent science suggests that exercise may slow the fraying of telomeres. Past studies have found, for instance, that master athletes typically have longer telomeres than sedentary people of the same age, as do older women who frequently walk or engage in other fairly moderate exercise.

But those studies were relatively narrow, focusing mostly on elderly people who ran or walked. It remained unclear whether people of different ages who engaged in a variety of exercises would likewise show effects on their telomeres.

So for the new study, which was published this month in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, researchers from the University of Mississippi and University of California, San Francisco, decided to look more broadly at the interactions of exercise and telomeres among a wide swath of Americans.

To do so, they turned to the immense trove of data generated by the ongoing National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, for which tens of thousands of adults answer questions annually about their health, including their exercise habits, and complete an in-person health exam, providing a blood sample.

In recent years, those blood samples have been tested for, among other markers of health, telomere length in the participants’ white blood cells.

The researchers gathered the data for about 6,500 of the participants, ranging in age from 20 to 84, and then categorized them into four groups, based on how they had responded to questions about exercise.

Those questions in this survey tended to be broad, asking people only if, at any time during the past month, they had engaged in weight training, moderate exercise like walking, more vigorous exercise like running, or have walked or ridden a bike to work or school.

If a participant answered yes to any of those four questions, he or she earned a point from the researchers. So, someone who reported walking received a point. If he also ran, he earned another, and so on, for a maximum of four points.

The researchers then compared those tallies to each person’s telomere length.

And there were clear associations. For every point someone gained from any type of exercise, his or her risks of having unusually short telomeres declined significantly.

Specifically, someone who participated in a single activity, earning them a 1, was about 3 percent less likely to have very short telomeres than someone who didn’t exercise at all.

That risk declined more substantially if someone exercised more. People who reported two types of exercise were 24 percent less likely to have short telomeres; three types of exercise were 29 percent less likely; and those who had participated in all four types of activities were 59 percent less likely to have very short telomeres.

Interestingly, these associations were strongest among people between the ages of 40 and 65, the researchers found, suggesting that middle age may be a key time to begin or maintain an exercise program if you wish to keep telomeres from shrinking, says Paul Loprinzi, an assistant professor of health and exercise science at the University of Mississippi. He was a co-author of the study with Jeremy Loenneke, also of the University of Mississippi, and Elizabeth Blackburn, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who shared a Nobel Prize in 2009 for the discovery of the molecular nature of telomeres.

However, as Dr. Loprinzi points out, this study is purely associational, so cannot show whether exercise actually causes changes in telomere length, only that people who exercise have longer telomeres.

The study also couldn’t tease out the ideal amount of exercise for telomere maintenance, Dr. Loprinzi say, because the survey asked only whether someone exercised at all, not how frequently.

By Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, August 12, 2015

A small amount of exercise may improve our ability to think as we age, but more may not be better, according to a new study of exercise and cognition.

We all know that working out is good for us. But precisely how much or how little exercise is needed to gain various health benefits, and whether the same dose of exercise that bolsters heart health, for instance, is also ideal for the brain has remained unclear.

For the new study, which was published last month in PLOS One, scientists with the University of Kansas Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Fairway, Kan., and other institutions recently decided to see if they could determine just how much exercise is needed to improve the ability to think.

They began by recruiting 101 sedentary older adults, at least 65 years of age, who were generally healthy, with no symptoms of dementia or other cognitive impairments.

They chose these volunteers, said Dr. Jeffrey Burns, the co-director of the University of Kansas Alzheimer’s Disease Center and the study’s senior author, because the men and women had reached the age at which many of us begin to develop the first worrisome declines in our memory and thinking skills.

The scientists brought these volunteers to the lab and had them complete a series of tests, including measurements of their aerobic capacity and how well they could remember and think.

Then the volunteers were randomly assigned to one of four groups. People in the control group continued their normal lives.

People in the other three groups were assigned to walk briskly. One group began exercising for 75 minutes per week, which is half of the current recommendation of 150 minutes per week of moderate exercise. Another group was assigned to exercise for the recommended 150 minutes per week. And the third group was directed to exercise for 225 minutes per week, or 150 percent of the recommended amount.

The exercising volunteers reported to a local YMCA for their workouts, which consisted of supervised brisk walks on a treadmill for anywhere from 25 minutes to an hour. (Some volunteers used an elliptical machine for some of their workouts.)

After 26 weeks, all of the participants returned to the lab to repeat the original tests.

At this point, the groups displayed notable differences, especially in the physical realm. The more someone had exercised, the more his or her endurance capacity had increased, which was hardly a surprise. The volunteers in the control group were no more fit than they had been; those in the group exercising for 75 minutes per week were somewhat more fit; those exercising for 150 minutes per week were fitter still; and those walking for 225 minutes per week were the most fit of all.

“There was a very clear dose-response relationship” between walking and fitness, Dr. Burns said.

That relationship was murkier when the scientists looked at thinking, however.

In general, the researchers found, most of the exercisers showed improvements in their thinking skills, especially in their ability to control their attention and to create visual maps of spaces in their heads, two aspects of cognition that are known to decline with age.

But these gains were about the same whether people had exercised for 75 minutes a week or 225 minutes. Those volunteers who had exercised the most scored slightly better on some cognitive tests at the end of the study period than those exercising less, but the difference was barely significant.

Over all, “a small dose of exercise” may be sufficient to improve many aspects of thinking and more sweat may not provide noticeably more cognitive benefit, Dr. Burns said.

On the other hand, more exercise will likely make you more aerobically fit, Dr. Burns said, which has other health effects.

Hip Fractures Kills

Falls more frequent with age

Laurence T. Gayao, MD “Hip fractures kills” said Dr. Erika J. Mitchell in her speech at the annual meeting of the Clinical Orthopedic Society. She pointed out that the average person is more concern about cancer than hip fracture. The 30 day chance of dying after a hip fracture is 9 percent. It rises to 17 percent if the patient has already an acute…