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22 novembre 2012

Women: How to Look Younger and Live Longer

By Nicky Morris


Making key changes to your lifestyle can keep you looking younger and healthier.

We all know that being overweight, drinking too much, smoking and lack of exercise is going to have a bad affect on our health. And what affect do these factors have on our life expectancy?

A team of researchers came together from the National Institutes of Health and Human Services, and the National Cancer Institute to investigate this very question. They've been reviewing the factors that may have an impact on either decreasing or increasing the life expectancy of older women.

The researchers said about the purpose of study that: "Our goal was to assess the relative strength and joint contributions of factors on the risk of death in postmenopausal women". They were specifically examining the factors that were affecting life expectancy, which could easily be adjusted by simple changes to diet or increasing exercise.

What are most important factors for a long life?

The study was large, consisting of almost 18,000 women, who had an average of 68.

The most significant risk factors that could easily be changed were: being unfit, smoking, high blood pressure and being overweight with a high concentration of fat around the abdomen.

How do you go about reducing this risk factors?

Fortunately, the researchers demonstrated that a few relatively small changes to your lifestyle can have a significant impact on not just your health, but also your life expectancy.

Including:

Start to exercise. Any type of exercise is good for health, even a simple 30 min daily walk has been shown to lower blood pressure, reduce anxiety, reduce arthritic pain, reduce the progression of dementia and diabetes, reduce depression, and make you lose weight, which leads to the second point and third points.

Trim down and lose that stomach. The researchers pointed out that it was really important to lose the 'tummy fat', as studies have indicated that there's increased risk of heart disease in people carrying fat round their waist.

Maintaing a normal blood pressure, which can be done by exercise, balanced diet and not smoking.

Give up smoking. If you're a smoker, quitting is a major milestone in reducing the risks of cancers and heart disease.

Out of these four, the researchers raised smoking as one most damaging to your health. Smoking causes 25% of cancer deaths among women. The researchers said: "The strong association of smoking with mortality is a critical reminder that smoking is the most important modifiable risk factor that physicians and society should address, even in older women." (Arch Intern Med 2006;2469-77)




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