Quick Study Analysis: Does Exercise Delay Mortality and Injury Risk in the Elderly?
Quick Study Analysis: Does Exercise Delay Mortality and Injury Risk in the Elderly?
"Association of Long-term Exercise Training with Risk of Falls, Fractures, Hospitalizations, and Mortality in Older Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis."
I found this paper via, “Shifting Sands: Unsound Science and Unsafe Regulation. Report #2: Flimsy Food Findings--Food Frequency Questionnaires, False Positives, and Fallacious Procedures in Nutritional Epidemiology”
They present two p-value graphs. One showing a relationship (flat line in significance—the dashed line at the bottom of the graph at 0.05) for smoking and lung cancer:
The p-values are consistently in the same place, showing that the studies keep finding the same thing. OK, that makes sense.
But they they have this one, showing a purely random result (~45 degree line) for exercise and mortality and morbidity in the elderly.
Sure enough, as the paper states:
“Exercise did not significantly diminish the risk of multiple falls (13 RTCs; 3060 participants), hospitalization (12 RTCs; 5639 participants), and mortality (29 RTCs; 11 441 participants).”
There are benefits—don’t just sink back into the Couch of Doom—but a lot less than I would have thought.
“Exercise significantly decreased the risk of falls (n = 20 RCTs; 4420 participants; RR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.79-0.98) and injurious falls (9 RTCs; 4481 participants; RR, 0.74; 95% CI, 0.62-0.88), and tended to reduce the risk of fractures (19 RTCs; 8410 participants; RR, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.71-1.00; P = .05).”
Or, to put it concisely: “Exercise did not diminish the risk of multiple falls, hospitalization, and mortality.”
Drat. I really am surprised by this.
I guess the take-away from this result that that you shouldn’t kill yourself exercising in your old age to avoid an early grave. Although it could also be that when you’re old and infirm enough to start suffering “multiple falls”, your time has come.
Staying in shape to avoid injury in falls has been my rationale for years. I guess it is a good one.
Speaking as someone in the relevant age category (69), I find this a little bit funny. Aside from the fact that it strikes me as overthinking the subject, not to mention that I'm always suspect of meta-analyses, we have some real-world anecdotal evidence here in my NORC (Naturally Occurring Retirement Community, i.e. a place mostly inhabited by old farts).
I'm in a small group which gets together weekly to play ping-pong (winter) and pickle ball (summer). Maybe 10 people total. I know this doesn't rise to the level of 2 to 3 times a week mentioned in the study, but people around here tend to be more generally active anyway.
We jokingly call ourselves badass because we've had: one broken hip, one broken wrist, loosened and broken teeth, and a handful of cases of road rash. When we started the pickle ball last spring we soon created a rule of No Running, because that was almost always when people fell down. (Of course this might've been a consequence of inappropriate footwear, i.e. hiking boots.)
I'm with you, exercise is a Good Thing. It has many other benefits besides fall prevention.
P.S. You might be surprised to learn that the most severe injury, the broken hip, happened during ping-pong, on a carpeted floor. To be fair, the subject was over 90 and, to her credit, she was diving for the ball. Sadly, her daughter won't let her play with us anymore.
That whole Shifting Sands series is a great find. There have been three reports in the series so far; all accessible at https://www.nas.org/report-series/shifting-sands-keeping-count-of-government-science
The Covid report is Report III.
BTW it's interesting to read the Wikipedia entry for the National Association of Scholars. They're painted from the get-go as a radical right wing influence group. Out of curiosity, I looked at the entry for John Ioannides. It's not as blatant in painting him as a conspiracy theorist, relying mostly on less direct implications that he spread COVID-19 misinformation. There's a whole section on his COVID-19 activity which makes for interesting reading. I've come to view Wikipedia as the left-wing dogma police ;)