Good news for all runners the world over, a new review of past research data about exercise and premature death finds that running may afterall have Long-Lasting Benefits.
The study found that runners live three years more on average than non-runners, even if they they only run from time to time.
For the study, which was published in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, researchers from Iowa State University, the University of South Carolina, the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., and other institutions turned to a huge database maintained at the Cooper Clinic and Cooper Institute in Dallas.
From this database, the researchers chose the records of 55,137 healthy men and women ages 18 to 100 who had visited the clinic at least 15 years before the start of the study. Of this group, 24 percent identified themselves as runners.
The researchers then checked death records for these adults. In the intervening 15 or so years, almost 3,500 had died, many from heart disease.
But the runners were much less susceptible than the non-runners. The runners’ risk of dying from any cause whatsoever was 30 percent lower than that for the non-runners, and their risk of dying from heart disease was 45 percent lower than for non-runners.
Remarkably, the study also found that these benefits were about the same, no matter how much or little people ran including those who ran as little as 5 minutes a day, they still lived longer than those who didn’t run…
Duck-chul Lee, professor of kinesiology at Iowa State University and one of the co-authors of the study “Running as a Key Lifestyle Medicine for Longevity“, also added that activities such as walking were similarly beneficial.
Don’t know about you reading this, but as for me, Running is now officially my favourite leisure-time physical activity.
