Study Suggests Running Makes For Longer Life Expectancy
A new study has found that middle-aged members of a runner’s club were only half as likely to die over a 20-year period as people who did not run.
Researchers at Stanford University in California published the study on Monday that showed running reduced the risk of not only heart disease, but of cancer and neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
"At 19 years, 15 percent of runners had died compared with 34 percent of controls," Dr. Eliza Chakravarty and colleagues said.
Stanford’s Dr. James Fries, who worked on the study, said any type of vigorous exercise would likely do the trick.
"Both common sense and background science support the idea that there is nothing magical about running per se," Fries said. "It is the regular physical vigorous activity that is important."
For the study, 284 members of a nationwide running club and 156 similar, healthy people as controls were analyzed. They all came from the university’s faculty and staff and had similar social and economic backgrounds, and all were 50 or older.
Starting in 1984, each volunteer filled out an annual survey on exercise frequency, weight and disability for eight activities — rising, dressing and grooming, hygiene, eating, walking, reach, hand grip and routine physical activities.
The majority of the volunteers polled did some exercise, but runners exercised as much as 200 minutes a week, compared to 20 minutes for the non-runners.
At the beginning, the runners were leaner and less likely to smoke compared with the controls. And they exercised more over the whole study period in general.
The researchers wrote: “Over time, all groups decreased running activity, but the runners groups continued to accumulate more minutes per week of vigorous activity of all kinds."
They added that members of the running groups had significantly lower mean disability levels at all time points.
The team also set out to answer whether taking up running late in life would benefit, and whether people who stopped exercising began to pay a price as they aged.
Fries said most of the runners had stopped running as they reached their 70s. But it was difficult to find people who totally stopped exercising. "Almost all of them did something else. They continued their vigorous exercise," he said.
He said people who took up exercise when they were older also improved their health.
Another interesting result of the study showed that people cannot use the risk of injury as an excuse not to run — the runners had fewer injuries of all kinds, including to their knees.
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