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.
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 ;)
https://ijbnpa.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12966-020-01041-3
Results
This review included 116 studies, involving 25,160 participants; nine new studies since the 2019 Cochrane Review. Exercise reduces the rate of falls by 23% (pooled rate ratio (RaR) 0.77, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.71 to 0.83, 64 studies, high certainty evidence). Subgroup analysis showed variation in effects of different types of exercise (p < 0.01). Rate of falls compared with control is reduced by 24% from balance and functional exercises (RaR 0.76, 95% CI 0.70 to 0.82, 39 studies, high certainty evidence), 28% from programs involving multiple types of exercise (commonly balance and functional exercises plus resistance exercises, RaR 0.72, 95% CI 0.56 to 0.93, 15 studies, moderate certainty evidence) and 23% from Tai Chi (RaR 0.77, 95% CI 0.61 to 0.97, 9 studies, moderate certainty evidence). The effects of programs that primarily involve resistance training, dance or walking remain uncertain. Interventions with a total weekly dose of 3+ h that included balance and functional exercises were particularly effective with a 42% reduction in rate of falls compared to control (Incidence Rate Ratio (IRR) 0.58, 95% CI 0.45 to 0.76). Subgroup analyses showed no evidence of a difference in the effect on falls on the basis of participant age over 75 years, risk of falls as a trial inclusion criterion, individual versus group exercise, or whether a health professional delivered the intervention.