Palscience

According to a new study from Stanford University School of Medicine, regular running slows the effects of aging, slows heart attack deaths, and early cancer deaths.

“The study has a very pro-exercise message,” said James Fries, MD, an emeritus professor of medicine at the medical school and the study’s senior author. “If you had to pick one thing to make people healthier as they age, it would be aerobic exercise.”

The study began in 1984 when Fries and his team tracked over 500 older runners for more than 20 years. Many doctors and researchers suggested that exercising for elderly would harm them more than benefits their bodies; they said that running would have long-term orthopedic injuries. But Fries had a different opinion or hypothesis which called (the compression of morbidity theory). He thought regular exercise would extend high-quality, disability free life. Keeping the body moving, he speculated, wouldn’t necessarily extend longevity, but it would compress the period at the end of life when people couldn’t carry out daily tasks on their own.

Running doesn’t only slow aging process; the study has found other great benefits, for example, it slows cardiovascular deaths, and it has also been associated with few early deaths from cancer, neurological disease, infections and other causes.

“Running straight ahead without pain is not harmful,” he said, adding that running seems safer for the joints than high-impact sports such as football, or unnatural motions like standing en pointe in ballet.

“When we first began, there was skepticism about our ideas,” Fries said.  “Now, many other findings go in the same direction.”

The original study