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A new long-term study of population-level data shows that when it comes to health, virtually anyone can make improvements, plus the relationship to risk factors and mortality changes over time, sometimes in surprising ways.
“You can think of this as a good news story or a bad news story, depending on how you want to look at these numbers,” said Jennifer Kuk, the study’s lead author, senior author of the Department of Health, and an associate professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Science. . “What we found is that the relationship with risk factors and mortality changes over time, which can be explained by factors such as evolution in treatments and changes in social stigma.
“In general, most of us have something wrong with us, and we’re more likely to have a health risk factor to our lifestyle now than we were in the 1980s and that’s actually associated with an even greater risk of mortality now than before.”
The research, recently published in PLOS One, took U.S. survey data from 1988 to 1994 and 1999 to 2014, and looked at the 5-year mortality rate for people age 20 or older. The research team looked at 19 different risk factors and then adjusted the data for age, gender, obesity category and ethnicity.
What they found overall was that less than 3% of people had none of the risk factors. While previous research has documented the risk factors very well, Kuk says what was less understood was the relationship between various risks and the likelihood of death over time. Kuk and the research team found that this relationship can sometimes be paradoxical.
For example, according to Kuk, smoking rates, which have long been linked to conditions that can lead to death, such as cancer, heart disease, stroke and diabetes, have generally fallen thanks to strong public health campaigns. However, the overall risk of being a smoker increased over time, which Kuk says may be explained by greater stigma as addiction became less common and awareness of risk increased, which may also be reflected in research funding.
“If you look at cancer research, there’s a lot of money in general, but for lung cancer specifically, it seems to be related to moral error and, as a result, less money,” says Kuk. “If you look at the mortality risk associated with having lung cancer compared to all other common cancers, it’s extremely high. So I think this lack of push is detrimental.”
Kuk’s main area of research is obesity, and here she found that while the prevalence has risen, the risks have decreased.
“Even though there are more and more obese people, it’s not actually leading to more deaths over time. And so I think that’s another clear thing that we need to recognize, that we’re very good at treating the consequences associated with obesity. And no matter what our body weight is, most of us have something we can probably work on.”
Some of the other health trends Kuk found in the data include:
- The rates for diabetes and hypertension have risen over time, but the risks have come down.
- More people are not exercising, and this is now related to worse outcomes than it once was.
- The use of mental health drugs was not a significant risk factor in the 1980s, but was associated with increased mortality in the later data set.
- Failure to complete high school is associated with health risks, whereas in the 1980s it was not.
While Kuk says the research indicates that almost all of us have room for improvement when it comes to various factors such as diet, exercise, smoking, alcohol and drug use, she also says there are factors that many people have no individual control over.
“When we look at things like food insecurity, low education, we as a society are making health not an easy choice for many people. We have to be sensitive to that as we look at these risk factors.”
More information:
Winnie W. Yu et al, Is anyone really healthy? Trends in the prevalence of health risk factors and changes in their association with all-cause mortality, PLOS ONE (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0286691
Quote: New study answers the question: Is someone really healthy? (2023, July 5) Retrieved July 8, 2023 from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-07-healthy.html
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