Enkle spørsmål kan forutsi helserisiko

Denne våren ble de første resultatene fra en stor britisk helseundersøkelse og informasjonsdatabase, UK Biobank, publisert i tidsskriftet The Lancet. UK Biobank består av over 655 ulike måledata på faktorer relatert til helse fra omtrent en halv million briter i alderen 40 til 70 år. Et av målene til studien er rett og slett å rangere all informasjonen, som spenner fra antall hvite blodceller, om man er venstre- eller høyrehendt til hvor mange biler husholdningen disponerer, i forhold til hvordan de statistisk henger sammen med risikoen for tidlig død av ulike sykdommer innen en 5-års periode. Videre utviklet forskerne en enkel risikoscore basert på noen av de viktigste variablene de fant.

Simple questions predicted health risk

This spring the first data from a large British health survey and information database, called the UK Biobank, was published in The Lancet. UK Biobank consist of more than 655 different measurements of demographics, health and lifestyle factors from about 500 000 middle-aged to elderly brits. The aim of the study was simply to rank all the information, spanning from number of white blood cells and preferred handedness to number of vehicles in your household, by their statistical association with risk of premature death from different diseases within 5 years. Then the researchers developed a prediction score based on the strongest predictors for each sex.

The Optimus Tempus of your Life?

Getting old itself is associated with numerous shortcomings, or are there advantages of being older?

The notion of prime time of life has been changing with the changing era. Some say that life begins at 40, or 60 is the new 50. Is there a way to figure out what is the best age to be? I try to summarize the writings of already published BBC article on this topic, published on 26^th May 2015.

When we talk about physical fitness, mid 20s seems to be the best age for sprint running, shot put, javelin or other associated sports activities with a sharp decline after hitting 30s. Professional footballers have their prime time in sports in early 20 years of their life.

Senior Olympics – Aging and fitness

The Senior Olympics is a biennial competition for athletes over 50 and consist of a variety of sports, and for this year ́s Games, in and around Minneapolis-St. Paul, in Minnesota, nearly 10,000 men and women aged from 50 to 100 participate. The games begin on Friday 2nd of July. Senior Olympians are not professional athletes, but most train frequently, and tend to be more physically active than other people of the same chronological age.

CERGs Fitness Calculator has been extremely popular worldwide and the calculated Fitness Number was recently shown to be a robust predict of current and future health. CERG is now making the first catalogue of global fitness for “normal people” that could be used for a variety of purposes, especially to define large-scale public health policies. We have now fitness data from exactly 100 countries and on average about 1000 new users worldwide register their fitness and health data every day.

Also, we aim to study special groups such as the Senior Athletes. In collaboration with Dr. Pamela Peeke at The University of Maryland and board member of the foundation that runs the National Senior Games we are now determining the health status and their Fitness Age. So far we have collected data on more than 5000 of the Senior Athletes before the Games starts, and expect to have data for most of the 10,000 participants within the upcoming week. As can be seen from the figure to the right, Fitness Age in both Senior Olympic men and women was about 25 years lower than their real age.

This is a massive difference! We had expected a big difference as these people have trained for years and are probably among the fittest in the world in their age groups. However we were surprised it was that big. As can be seen from the figure to the left their peak oxygen uptake (fitness number) is about 13 ml/kg/min higher compared with their healthy, normally active and age matched counterparts.

New York Times: Older Athletes Have a Striking Yong Fitness Age