Newswise, August 10, 2016– Physical declines begin sooner in
life than typically detected, often when people are still in their 50s,
according to a Duke
Health study that focused on a large group of U.S. adults across a
variety of age groups.
The finding suggests that efforts to maintain basic strength
and endurance should begin before age 50, when it’s still possible to preserve
the skills that keep people mobile and independent later in life.
“Typically, functional tests are conducted on people in their
70s and 80s, and by then you’ve missed 40 years of opportunities to remedy
problems,” said Miriam
C. Morey, Ph.D., senior fellow in the Center for the Study of Aging and
Human Development at Duke University School of Medicine. Morey is senior author
of research published in the Journals of Gerontology: Medical Sciences.
Morey and colleagues studied a group of 775 participants
enrolled in the Measurement to Understand the Reclassification of Disease Of
Cabarrus/Kannapolis (MURDOCK) Study.
The MURDOCK Study is Duke Health’s longitudinal clinical
research study based at the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis, N.C.
The MURDOCK community registry and bio-repository includes more than 12,000
participants and nearly 460,000 biological specimens.
For the MURDOCK Physical Performance Lifespan Study, the Duke-led
team enrolled participants ranging in age from their 30s through their 100s,
with broad representation across sexes and races.
All participants performed the same simple tasks to
demonstrate strength, endurance or balance: rising from a chair repeatedly for
30 seconds; standing on one leg for a minute; and walking for six minutes.
Additionally, their walking speed was measured over a distance of about 10
yards.
Men generally performed better than women on the tasks, and
younger people outperformed older participants.
But the age at which declines in physical ability began to
appear – in the decade of the 50s – were consistent regardless of gender or
other demographic features.
Specifically, both men and women in that mid-life decade began
to slip in their ability to stand on one leg and rise from a chair. The decline
continued through the next decades. Further differences in aerobic endurance
and gait speed were observed beginning with participants in their 60s and 70s.
The study provides physical ability benchmarks that could be
easily performed and measured in clinical exams, providing a way to detect
problems earlier.
“Our research reinforces a life-span approach to maintaining
physical ability – don’t wait until you are 80 years old and cannot get out of
a chair,” said lead author Katherine S. Hall, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine
at Duke.
“People often misinterpret ‘aging’ to mean ‘aged’, and that
issues of functional independence aren’t important until later in life. This
bias can exist among researchers and healthcare providers, too. The good news
is, with proper attention and effort, the ability to function independently can
often be preserved with regular exercise.”
Hall and Morey said the next phase of research will be to
study blood samples of the participants to determine whether there are
biological markers that correlate with declines in physical ability. They are
also revisiting the study participants for two-year checkups.
In addition to Hall and Morey, study authors include Harvey J.
Cohen, Carl F. Pieper, Gerda G. Fillenbaum, William E. Kraus, Kim M. Huffman,
Melissa A. Cornish,Andrew Shiloh,Christy Flynn, Richard Sloane, and L. Kristin
Newby.
The study received funding from a philanthropic gift to Duke
University from the David H. Murdock Institute for Business and Culture.
Additional funding was provided in part by
the Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center program of the
National Institute on Aging (P30AG028716) and the National Center for Research
Resources, a component of the NIH (UL1TR001117).
The authors reported no conflicts of interest associated with
this research.
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