A sizable body of epidemiological evidence links physical fitness to improved health, greater longevity, and slowed aging in later life. Use it or lose it, as they say. Here researchers quantify the degree to which physical fitness can slow the onset of the chronic diseases of aging. Obviously one can't escape degenerative aging via exercise, but given that maintaining fitness has one of the larger presently available effects on the long-term trajectory of health, why not make the effort?
Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) has been linked to lower risk of individual chronic diseases, but little is known about the CRF in relation to multimorbidity. Thus the authors here investigated the association between CRF and multimorbidity risk and explored differences in the trajectories of chronic disease accumulation at varying levels of CRF. The study included 38,348 adults from the UK Biobank (mean age 55.21 ± 8.15 years) who were followed for up to 15 years to detect the incidence of 59 common chronic diseases. CRF was estimated using a 6-minute submaximal exercise test and tertiled as low, moderate, and high (after standardization by age and sex). Multimorbidity was defined as the presence of 2 or more chronic diseases.
During the follow-up (median 11.57 years), 15,368 (40.08%) participants developed multimorbidity. The risk of multimorbidity was 21% lower in participants with high compared to low CRF (hazard ratio, HR: 0.79). The median time to multimorbidity onset was 1.27 years later for those with high compared to low CRF. Moreover, participants with high CRF experienced a significantly slower annual rate of chronic disease accumulation (β = -0.043). Thus high CRF is associated with lower multimorbidity risk, delayed onset of multimorbidity, and significantly slower accumulation of chronic diseases. The findings highlight the importance of CRF for healthy longevity.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacadv.2025.102198
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