Healthy behaviors at age 50 years and frailty at older ages in a 20-year follow-up of the UK Whitehall II cohort: A longitudinal study

We examined the associations of healthy behaviors at age 50, singly and in combination, as well as 10-year change in the number of healthy behaviors over midlife with future risk of frailty. Methods and findingsIn this prospective cohort study of 6,357 (29.2% women; 91.7% white) participants from the British Whitehall II cohort, healthy behaviors —nonsmoking, moderate alcohol consumption, ≥2.5 hours per week of moderate to vigorous physical activity, and consumption of fruits or vegetables at least twice a day—were measured at age 50, and change in behaviors was measured between 1985 (mean age = 44.4) and 1997 (mean age = 54.8). Fried’ s frailty phenotype was assessed in clinical examinations in 2002, 2007, 2012, and 2015. Participants were classified as frail if they had ≥3 of the following criteria: slow walking speed, low grip strength, weight loss, exhaustion, and low physical activity. An illness–death model accounting fo r both competing risk of death and interval censoring was used to examine the association between healthy behaviors and risk of frailty. Over an average follow-up of 20.4 years (standard deviation, 5.9), 445 participants developed frailty. Each healthy behavior at age 50 was associated with lower ri sk of incident frailty: hazard ratio (HR) after adjustment for other health behaviors and baseline characteristics 0.56 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.44–0.71;p
Source: PLoS Medicine - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Source Type: research