Chapter 5 "Running Life" - 4 Longevity

4. Factors of longevity Effects of running on lifespan On June 11, 1958, one of the greatest runners died at the age of seventy.His name was Clarence DeMar, and he ran for nearly half a century, that is, from 1909 to 1957. In 1909 he took part in the cross-country race held at the University of Vermont and came fourth.In 1957 he ran a 15-kilometre (9.3-mile) race in Bath, Maine. He ran his first race at twenty-one and quit at sixty-nine.In his forty-nine years of racing, he has logged more miles than any other athlete in history.He ran thirty-four Boston Marathons, winning seven of them, finishing in the top ten fifteen times, and running more than a thousand races, of which more than a hundred were full marathons.After Dema's death, the solemn New England Journal of Medicine dubbed him "Mr. Marathon" in an article.

Outside of running, Dema's history is unremarkable.He was born on a farm in Ohio. His father died when he was eight, and two years later the family (he had seven siblings) moved to Massachusetts. In 1915, DeMar received a degree in applied arts from Harvard, and a few years later, a master's degree in education from Boston University.He once worked as a part-time teacher in the Concord Reformatory School, worked as a proofreader in a newspaper at night, and ran a small farm in his later years. He ran almost every day.On the morning of the Boston Marathon, he would come home from proofreading, tend to his cows and chickens, take a nap before heading off to the race.

Dema's years of running have had some interesting effects on his body.After his death (of cancer), an autopsy was performed on his body.His heart is large, but within the normal range.His arteries were a little atherosclerotic, but mild for his age.The coronary arteries of his heart are one or two times larger than that of ordinary people. The New England Journal of Medicine said in a report on the autopsy (written by Paul Dudley White, an active supporter of running and physician to President Vincenthower): "Based on what is known so far , strenuous exercise has no adverse effect on the heart. There is hardly any athlete who has exercised longer in his life than Dema." A doctor who talked to me about the autopsy results simply said: "Dema cannot die of a heart attack. .There must be something else."

Clarence DeMar's body looks younger than his age if we judge by accepted age features.He had so much energy that he was able to compete even after being diagnosed with cancer.The coronary arteries in his heart are so large that blood can flow unimpeded.In his sixties, he was able to compete in sports that most people decades younger than him couldn't.In many important ways, Dema is still a young man.His case is not unique among runners whose aging process seems to be delayed. But do runners really outlive other people?Answering this question is not easy.Mice lived 25 percent longer than their sedentary counterparts if they exercised daily.But people are not mice, and responsible researchers are cautious about extrapolating to people from such results.Also, there are statistical issues.Dr. Paul Milvey, a biophysicist and epidemiologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, cautions that it is difficult to prove a causal link between physical activity and longevity."The criteria for showing causation are very stringent and difficult to meet," he said.

It is instructive to revisit the history of the longevity debate.Hippocrates' belief that sport played a role in premature death was so popular that, for hundreds of years, most people believed it.Yet in 1873, an anti-orthodox English physician, Dr. John Morgan, conducted research on the lifespans of ordinary people in England and those who took part in the Oxford-Cambridge rowing races between 1829 and 1869. compared.He found that people who participated in boat races lived two years longer than their insurance tables predicted they would live. The problem seems to have been solved in this way, especially since several studies of collegiate athletes have since found similar results.However, researchers later realized that when comparing ordinary people with college-educated people, mistakes could be made.In 1926, to eliminate this possible source of error, Greenway and Hiscock compared the life spans of Yale graduates who had been athletes with those of Yale graduates who were not athletes.Strangely, it turned out that non-athletes lived slightly longer.

This result is puzzling, but not conclusive, since Greenway and Hiscock surveyed a small number of people and is therefore likely to be inconsistent with the actual situation.So, six years later, Dublin used the records of each class from 1870 to 1905 at the eight eastern universities to compare the life spans of 4,976 players with those of 38,200 others. The lifespans of sixty-nine graduates were compared, and it turned out that there was a three-month difference in lifespan—again, the non-athletes lived longer. What conclusion should we draw from this?Of course, exercise may not be good for you at all, although most investigators don't think so.A more likely explanation is that athletes prefer to engage in dangerous occupations. * Most studies also report that being an athlete for a while does not protect people's health in the long run.If exercise is to continue to benefit your health, it must be consistent.

Note: * Some research reports show that athletes die more violently.Although there are various theories as to why, none conclusively show why this happens. But the main question remains unanswered, does running prolong life? Several recent research reports provide some information on this issue. Dr. Arthur Lyon and Dr. Henry Blake of the University of Minnesota recently stated that three or four times a week, continuous exercise for thirty to sixty minutes, "For most people, there is no doubt that it will improve health and quality of life, and perhaps prolong life." Of course, this is a robust estimate, but from the current research it is important.

Dr. Thomas Basler was less robust.In Chapter 1 we already mentioned his remarks about idle people being prone to diseases like heart disease.Dr. Basler, a pathologist in California, insists that completing a marathon in less than four hours can save a person years from heart disease.He has gained a bit of fame for insisting on this argument.While not all of Basler's medical colleagues agree with him, there are plenty who accept his argument.Basler made it clear that marathon running alone does not prevent heart disease, but there are two factors that keep people from heart disease.These two factors are (a)

Daily training is required; (2) The living habits of long-distance runners have been cultivated, which firstly include not smoking and eating foods with low harmful fat content such as cholesterol.A survey conducted on centenarians in Ecuador, Pakistan and the Soviet Union showed that a lot of physical labor and low-fat food are important common factors that make people live longer. An unusual opportunity to study the relationship between continual exercise and aging arose in 1975 at the World Veteran Championships in Toronto, an international track event attended by men aged thirty to nine. All over the age of ten.Dr. Terrence Kavanagh of Toronto Rehab and Dr. Roy Shepard of the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biostatics at the University of Toronto examined the bodies of 128 male and seven female athletes participating in the competition .They first found that these older athletes' ability to process oxygen declined more slowly than normal people and showed fewer heart abnormalities.Of course, language purists will point out that this conclusion does not take this factor of self-selection into account.This is true, but despite this, the discovery is still of great significance.

Another related study was conducted by Dr. Fred Cash of the Exercise Physiology Lab at San Diego State University.Cash began his work on the premise that a major marker of aging is a person's ability to work, since it is known that between the ages of thirty and seventy the ability to work declines by 35 to 40 percent.Therefore, if you can manage to keep your working ability longer than the average person, you will actually delay the aging process.Cash signed forty-three middle-aged men, ages 45 to 48, to a ten-year running and swimming program.As the years go by, the results are amazing.During the course of the study, the men's maximum heart rate was lower than according to the "usual"

The human data predicted a much smaller number.Their resting heart rates decreased because their hearts were more efficient, and their ability to transport oxygen either increased (for those who were inactive before the start of the program) or remained the same, compared to age-matched on average 36 percent higher than people of the same sex (for formerly athletic people). *In effect, the program is like a kind of time-counting machine in which people age more slowly than their non-exercising contemporaries. Note: *Heart rate and oxygen delivery capacity are closely related to age.The relationship between heart rate and running will be discussed in the next chapter. A very recent and extremely ambitious effort to explore the relationship between exercise and longevity was carried out in Boston in 1965 by Dr. Charles Ross et al.They interviewed the next of kin of the five hundred people who died that year in Boston, asking them hundreds of questions about food and drink habits, recreation, occupation, and exercise on and off work.He calculated a total of two hundred factors.He then tried to use sophisticated statistical techniques to discover which factors were most closely associated with longevity.One of his findings, which is both odd and meaningful, is that physical activity at rest is more beneficial to a person than physical activity at work.Especially between the ages of forty and forty-nine, exercising during downtime is one of the best ways to promote longevity.However, a more recent study published in early 1977 by Dr. Ralph Paffenberg Jr., Dr. Wayne Hale, Dr. Richard Brand and Dr. Robert Hyde The report showed that San Francisco longshoremen who performed heavy labor had fewer heart attacks than those who performed only light labor.The conclusion is clear: Whether you're active at get off work or off, you're likely to live longer. Although the scientific community is hopeful about the future, it is still cautious and unwilling to put forward some views that cannot be fully verified.Unless someone does a study that specifically addresses not only the relationship between running and signs of aging, but also the relationship between running and how long runners actually live, it's impossible to say with any certainty that runners live longer.But despite this, many people with a lot of scientific knowledge working on the subject believe that this is the case. But there is no coherent evidence to support this view, and tantalizing bits and pieces of evidence abound.For example, let's look at one type of evidence, a project currently underway at the Santa Barbara Longevity Institute. Some people (many of them doctors) think that longevity research is useless.In a long letter to the local newspaper, the Santa Barbara News, one doctor insisted that the Longevity Institute's approach did not solve the real problem and that the results were only short-term, and that, in his words, "the Center takes It is a policy of bandaging wounds." But despite this, some of its claims are worth studying.A classic example is when patients come to the Longevity Institute asking for a cure instead of coronary artery bypass surgery, a complex and expensive procedure performed on patients with coronary arteries. * Coronary bypass surgery involves replacing an artery that has become clogged with cholesterol and other substances (like a water pipe narrowed by increased mineral deposits).While coronary artery bypass surgery can lead to fantastic results in some cases, it is not an absolute guarantee of cure.About 20 percent of people have their arteries reclogged within a year.The Longevity Institute's treatment involves putting patients on an exercise program -- walking and running -- and sticking to a low-fat diet, which the institute's directors say will unclog clogged arteries without requiring coronary surgery. Bypass surgery. Note: *One patient said he paid $25,000.Typical fees are $10,000 to $15,000. A fifty-five-year-old man suffered from chest pains for six years and was told by the doctor that he needed bypass surgery. Vasograms (x-rays of the heart after the blood vessels were infused with a radiopaque fluid) showed that all three coronary arteries were severely blocked.He started activities under the program of the Longevity Institute.Thirty days later, he was walking four miles a day without taking any medicine for his chest pain.Most meaningfully, his treating cardiologist says he has recovered and is now "able to engage in vigorous exercise." The relationship of these cases to the question of longevity is that senile diseases (first of all coronary artery disease) are closely linked with the aging of the body.So, if the disease could be stopped, or reversed, the aging process itself would in effect be reversed. Another example reported by the Longevity Institute is that of an eighty-three-year-old man who became progressively older (the result of aging changes in the blood vessels in his brain) and could not walk without support.On a food and exercise program, his brain function returned and he was able to walk on his own. This last example is a favorite of the heads of the Longevity Institute to cite.There was an eighty-one-year-old woman in Santa Monica named Eura Weaver, whose first signs of aging were high blood pressure and a decline in the function of her heart and joints.She could only walk a hundred feet, and her circulation was so slow that she had to wear gloves even in summer.She began to follow the program of the Longevity Institute.Four years later when she was eighty-five.She competed in the half-mile and one-mile races at the Seniors' Olympics in Irvine, California, winning gold in both events. (The papers don't say exactly how strong her opponents were, or whether she actually had one, but what does it really matter?) The following year, 1976, she won two more gold medals .She runs a mile every morning, pedals another ten to fifteen miles on a stationary bike, and hits the gym twice a week.When news of her was last reported, she was eighty-eight years old and still in good health. While the evidence on longevity—including from the Longevity Institute—is not conclusive, most evidence clearly shows that running is more likely to prolong life than shorten it.At present, fewer and fewer people say that running shortens lifespan, while many people say that running may prolong lifespan.If that's the only material we have so far, it seems like a good enough argument that running is a good thing.While this argument is not airtight, it is well founded.