
Does Exercise Slow the Aging Process? - prostoalex
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/28/does-exercise-slow-the-aging-process/?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
======
reasonattlm
Life-long spontaneous exercise does not prolong lifespan but improves health
span in mice
[http://www.longevityandhealthspan.com/content/2/1/14](http://www.longevityandhealthspan.com/content/2/1/14)

Dose of Jogging and Long-Term Mortality : The Copenhagen City Heart Study
[http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jacc.2014.11.023](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jacc.2014.11.023)

Working up a sweat -- it could save your life
[http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-04/jcu-
wua040215...](http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-04/jcu-
wua040215.php)

Lack of exercise kills roughly as many as smoking, study says
[http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/07/lack-of-
ex...](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/07/lack-of-exercise-
kills-roughly-as-many-as-smoking-study-says.html)

Every Minute Of Exercise Could Lengthen Your Life Seven Minutes
[http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2013/03/minutes-exercise-
longer...](http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2013/03/minutes-exercise-longer-life)

And so on. There's a lot more out there on exercise and mortality risk as
determined from large epidemiological data sets in humans or cause-and-effect
animal studies if you care to go look around. One present focus is trying to
pin down the dose-response curve, for example.

Telomere length, as measured in the study linked here, isn't worth paying much
attention to. There are many, many problems with linking average telomere
length in white blood cells to specific outcomes in aging. In many ways it is
even more of a fuzzy number than, say, BMI or exercise level.

~~~
rmtew
The copenhagen study is one that stays with me. Over a period of 35 years, and
~17000 people, there are some interesting charts showing guidelines to
optimise jogging for longevity.

If I recall correctly, the best benefit was for joggers to run three times a
week for 7 kilometers at 7 kilometers per hour. This would give an extra five
years of life, and as the parameters (#times per week, distance, speed) veered
from this benefits declined along a bell curve.

~~~
jules
Interesting bit about 7 kilometers per hour. That's almost walking speed.

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pazimzadeh
Quoting my genetics professor:

"Exercise affects DNA repair systems. So moderate exercise speeds metabolism,
which increases free radical production, which damages DNA, which activates
DNA repair systems which catch the damage caused by the exercise and perhaps
some additional damage as well - that's good and probably increases lifespan.
Exercising too much creates more damage than the DNA repair systems can catch
- which is bad, and explains why very fit people are often unhealthy.
Exercising twice a week seems to be the optimum for most people."

~~~
lukas099
"Very fit people are often unhealthy"

Is this even true? It doesn't seem true.

~~~
ekianjo
Top level sportsmen are not known to live very long, so I'd rather say this is
probably true.

~~~
collyw
Can you give some examples? That sounds like some old wives tale to me.

~~~
abandonliberty
Here is a fairly in-depth analysis of the excessive running issue that made
rounds through the press last year.

Must be read critically, particularly the argument about confounding factors,
but it does a good job of introducing the various findings, actual data, and
arguments from both sides of the issue.

In any case, when it comes to running, the consensus is that there are
diminishing, eventually negative, returns.

[http://www.runnersworld.com/sweat-science/will-running-
too-m...](http://www.runnersworld.com/sweat-science/will-running-too-much-
kill-you)

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dibujante
How do they know that the relationship isn't the inverse: people with slower
telomerase reduction age more gracefully and are more likely to report being
physically active because they have developed fewer disabilities? Their
"critical window" (40-65) also lines up suspiciously well with when people's
bodies start to get creaky.

~~~
dredmorbius
There are studies which _can_ look at this, _if_ you can do long-term
longitudinal studies.

Taking two otherwise identical populations, _particularly_ identical twin
populations, and looking at how they respond to a regime of exercise vs. one
without might work. The duration of such studies (years to decades) makes them
_exceptionally_ difficult and expensive to carry out. And, of course, you
don't get results for ages.

One of the more famous of these is the Framhingham Heart Study, begun in 1948,
and now on its _third_ generation of participants. The original study included
over 5,200 participants:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framingham_Heart_Study](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framingham_Heart_Study)

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fasteo
Hormesis [1] is defined as a favorable biological response to low exposures to
stressors and it is a fundamental concept in biology that applies at any given
"resolution", so we have hormesis at the cell level up to hormesis at the
whole body level.

In this tense, exercise is just an stressor and the key here is the amount of
exercise: Too little and the hormetic response is not triggered; too much, and
your body is not able to cope with it.

Given this, it is quite difficult to say if exercise, without any qualifier,
is good or bad.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis)

------
known
METFORMIN does as per [http://qz.com/431663/scientists-want-to-treat-aging-
like-a-d...](http://qz.com/431663/scientists-want-to-treat-aging-like-a-
disease-and-they-already-have-drugs-for-it/)

~~~
jpollock
Yeah, but the side-effects can be unpleasant (explosive diarrhea)

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ljk
> _However, as Dr. Loprinzi points out, this study is purely associational, so
> cannot show whether exercise actually causes changes in telomere length,
> only that people who exercise have longer telomeres._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

~~~
danso
I don't think that that principle applies here. Betteridge's Law implies that
the OP knows the answer to be "No". In this situation, the OP _doesn 't_ know
the answer -- and so appropriately mentions that the headline is a question
that researchers are actually asking and hoping to answer at some point.

