Lifestyle choices, such as maintaining a healthy weight, not smoking, and regularly exercising, can significantly extend the number of years that an individual lives devoid of disease, says a new study.

Though people are on average living longer lives, as they grow older many live with diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. It has been shown that as lifespan extends, so does the risk of developing chronic illnesses.

Scientists have firmly established that lifestyle factors can make a significant difference to the risk of disease and length of life, overall.They have shown that smoking, inactivity, poor diet quality, and heavy alcohol consumption contribute up to 60 percent of premature deaths and a 7.4 years to17.9 years’ loss in life expectancy.

Researchers have now gone a step further to find out how a combination of lifestyle factors impacts the length of time an individual will be disease-free.

For their study, the researchers took data from two sources —  the Nurses’ Health Study, which included information from 73,196 female nurses, and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, which included data from 38,366 male health professionals.

The scientists used a lifestyle score from 0–5 for each participant, based on five low-risk lifestyle factors —  healthy weight, never smoking, exercising for at least 30 minutes each day, moderate alcohol intake, and a good quality diet.

Researchers followed the participants for many years and recorded diagnoses and deaths from cancer, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. As part of their analysis, the scientists accounted for a range of factors, including family medical history, age, and race.

The study found that women aged 50 who did not adopt any of the five low risk lifestyle factors could expect to live without cancer, diabetes, and heart disease for a further 24 years. However, those who followed four or five of these factors could expect an additional 34 disease-free years.

Men aged 50 who did not incorporate any of the low risk lifestyle factors into their lives could expect to live an extra 24 years free of chronic diseases. However, those whose lifestyle included four or five low risk factors had around 31 years of disease-free life.

Men who smoked more than 15 cigarettes each day, and anyone with obesity had the lowest amount of disease-free life expectancy after 50. The researchers concluded that adherence to a low risk lifestyle was associated with a longer life expectancy at age 50 free of major chronic diseases of approximately 7.6 years in men and 10 years in women compared with participants with no low risk lifestyle factors.

The scientists also found that men and women with four or five low risk lifestyle factors who received a diagnosis of cancer, cardiovascular disease, or type 2 diabetes lived longer than individuals with the same diagnosis who did not have any low risk factors. Apparently, a healthful lifestyle not only decreased the risk of incident cancer, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes but also improved the survival after diagnosis of those diseases.

However, the scientists cautioned that the study is observational, so it is not possible to conclude a causal relationship. Also, lifestyle factors were self-reported, which therefore does not preclude measurement errors.


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