Aiming for a birthday cake with over 100 candles? Then you'd better think about how you live – even if you're already over 80 years old.
This is shown by a new comprehensive study focusing on the elderly.
Genes are important, but lifestyle has a decisive impact on how old a person gets. In a Chinese study, researchers have investigated what increases the likelihood of someone who is 80 becoming over 100 years old.
And it's no surprising news – quit smoking, exercise, and eat healthily, is the recipe.
The interesting thing is that they followed people over 80 years old and looked at the significance of lifestyle factors, says Karin Modig, associate professor of epidemiology and researcher in aging and health at the Karolinska Institute in Solna.
Over 5,000 people
In the evaluation, published in Jama Network Open, over 5,000 individuals in China over 80 years old were asked about their lifestyle. To assess lifestyle, the researchers looked at, for example, smoking, physical activity, diet, and weight.
Those who had the healthiest lifestyle had a higher likelihood of becoming over 100 years old. The researchers' conclusion is that lifestyle continues to have an impact even for those older than 80.
A weakness of the study is that we don't know anything about how they lived before the age of 80. But there's nothing to suggest that starting or maintaining a healthy lifestyle after 80 won't work, says Karin Modig.
Karin Modig also notes that the results on physical activity prolonging life at high ages should be interpreted with caution. There's something called reverse causality.
Someone who can still be physically active at 90 is probably quite healthy. So, it's not certain that it's the exercise that made the person reach 90.
Hard to fool cells
Fredrik Ståhl is a professor at the University of Borås and also researches the impact of lifestyle on aging.
Diet and exercise are important, simply. Since muscle mass decreases in older people, strength training is preferable, if you have to choose. It's not wrong with cardio, but older people need strong muscles, he says.
But "fooling" cells into not aging is difficult, he means.
The entire aging process leads to many cellular functions becoming worse. The tricky thing is that when we try to change these processes, the risk is that we instead promote processes that make cells divide uncontrollably, which in turn leads to cancer, says Fredrik Ståhl.
He adds that a large number of studies on different animals show that limited calorie intake leads to higher age and healthier animals.
But to what extent this is applicable to humans is not clear, he says.
