Forget jumping jacks and treadmills. The latest research indicates that doing just household chores and other ordinary activities of every-day life is enough to help older people live longer.
According to the research conducted on adults between the age of 72 and 80, elderly couch potatoes had greater chance to die within around six years than those whose lives comprised regular activity: not more tiring than washing the dishes, vacuum cleaning, gardening or climbing stairs.
Nearly twelve percent of adults with the greatest amount of daily activity died within the six-year follow-up, in comparison to almost twenty five percent of the least active participants. The research that was sponsored by the government appears in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association.
"This is monumental research," stated Dr. Andrew Goldberg, a geriatrics specialist who was not involved in the study. "The investigators used state-of-the-art methodology to answer an extremely important question, which is how relevant is it to remain physically active."
The highest activity level researched "translates into a fifty percent decrease in mortality rate. That’s really big," claimed Goldberg, a University of Maryland professor and director of geriatric research at the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
The most vigorous people among the 302 adult participants observed did not even do much, if any, rigorous exercise. However, they were able to burn nearly 1,000 calories per day through activity, or around 600 more than those least active patients.
For a person weighing 170 pounds, roughly the average body weight in the research, that would equal about 3 1/2 hours of activity per day, including yard work and household chores, versus less than two hours of comparable activity for those least active.
The groups showed analogous amounts of age-related disease such as: diabetes, arthritis and cardiovascular disease that involved more than fifty per cent of the participants of the study.
The most active participants were more probable to work for pay and to climb two or more flights of stairs every day, however astonishingly they didn’t do greater amounts of traditional exercise, explained lead author Todd Manini, a scientist at the National Institute on Aging.
Jean Serpico, of Arlington Heights, Ill., who is seventy five, was not part of the study, but has habits similar to the majority of active participants in the research. She climbs stairs every day to her second-floor condo, frequently does volunteer work, enjoys household chores, baking, shopping and helping her elderly neighbors.
"I do all that to remain busy. I just can not sit and look out the window," Serpico explained. "I feel I must be active. I think it keeps me going."
According to the scientists, the results of the research don’t mean that older people who are involved in a more intense fitness regimen should give up, or that they will not achieve possibly even greater health benefits from it. Rather, they state, the research should be encouraging for those intimidated by traditional exercise, illustrating that activity doesn’t have to be exhausting to be advantageous.
Manini also stated that it is not clear whether the results would apply also to younger people.
The investigators used a laboratory technique that some consider the gold standard of measuring expended energy and more trustworthy than self-reported activity levels, even though they also questioned participants about their habits.
Participants were asked to drink especially formulated water that is expelled from the body as carbon dioxide, which is a direct measure of energy use. During the following fourteen days, they went about their usual activities. Two weeks later, the scientists measured the amount of special water still remaining in the body. The difference between the levels on the first and 14th day, factoring in resting metabolic rate, verified how much energy had been expended through activity.
Participants were then followed for up to about eight years.
Better activity-related cardiac fitness and well-being from feeling socially connected through work or volunteering might constitute a good explanation why active people lived longer, even though the research didn’t measure those effects, explained co-author Dr. James Everhart of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
Dr. Sandra Selikson, a geriatrics expert at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, informed that the results would help her encourage her elderly patients.
"You don’t need to be motivated to do a mini-triathalon or a 10K. Just being active … even benefited people who had some health problems," Selikson explained. "Doing something is always better than nothing."
