Your Age Isn’t the Best Predictor of Your Health
Your Age Isn’t the Best Predictor of Your Health
Biologically speaking, doctors have relied upon age to immediately place you in certain medical categories. But this way of looking at people isn’t the most accurate way to tell how healthy they really are. The concept of biological age, as opposed to chronological age, is gaining traction.
In a new report on the idea, published in the journal PNAS, researchers led by Martha McClintock, professor of psychology and comparative human development at the University of Chicago, are looking at which factors seemed to best predict healthy aging, McClintock and her team studied a population of 3,000 people aged 57 to 85 years enrolled in the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project. The study followed people for more than five years and recorded various physical and mental health characteristics. In particular, the scientists studied 54 health variables, including things like mobility and eyesight, that might play roles in how well people age.
Surprisingly, the people in the group that was deemed the healthiest after five years were typically heavier and had higher blood pressure. But they had fewer specific diseases and were mobile, retained their eye sight and hearing, and had good mental health.
The next healthiest group are those with normal weight who did not have heart problems or diabetes, but did have at least one minor condition, including ulcer or anemia. They were twice as likely as the healthiest group to die during the five year follow up.
The unhealthiest group included those with diabetes that wasn’t treated, and people who were relatively immobile.
The findings highlight how complicated the picture of aging is, and, says McClintock, supports the idea of coming up with a more comprehensive, rather than disease-specific way to evaluate people’s health as they age. Clearly, assuming that all people who are overweight are unhealthy may not be helpful. While overweight and obesity are certainly risk factors for many chronic diseases, including heart problems and diabetes, if people reach older age while carrying more weight but aren’t suffering from these conditions, then they might be relatively healthy.
More important than weight in predicting who might be vulnerable to ill health are things like bone fractures and poor mental health, according to the study. “We’ve shown that these other measures are just as important if not more important than organ system diseases in predicting healthy aging, so it’s crucial to include them in the practice of medicine and in healthy policy,” says McClintock.
These findings certainly won’t be the final word in healthy aging, but they’re critical in creating a more open and wide-ranging conversation about what it means to age in a healthy way, and the best way to do that.
Written by: Alice Park, http://time.com/4329792/how-healthy-am-i/
Photo from DarkoStojanovic via Pixabay