Consistently enjoying life could make you live longer

If you are looking for the recipe for a happy, healthy, and long life, you can forget pills and potions. The secret to living into ripe old age may have been revealed by researchers from the University College London in the United Kingdom, and the ingredients include several instances of life enjoyment.

Experiencing repeated high levels of enjoyment in life may help you to live longer.

The new research - featured in the Christmas issue of The BMJ - builds on a previous study by the team that looked at subjective well-being (feelings of enjoyment and satisfaction with life) on a single occasion.
Their earlier findings were promising and showed that enjoyment of life during a single moment in time was associated with a longer life. However, the team planned to take the research one step further and conduct a new study that analyzed whether enjoyment of life over a longer period would show the same results.
The University College London (UCL) researchers put forward the question: how important is sustained well-being? They aimed to examine whether enjoyment of life reported time after time over several years would have a stronger correlation with mortality than enjoyment of life reported as a single occurrence.
The study included 9,365 adults with an average age of 63 years. The participants were taking part in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), which is a study of men and women age 50 and older living in England.

Almost one quarter of people experienced no life enjoyment

Enjoyment of life was assessed three times at 2-year intervals between 2002-2006 through questionnaires, and associations with mortality were evaluated up to 2013.
The participants were asked to rate the following statements on a four-point scale to measure life enjoyment: "I enjoy the things that I do;" "I enjoy being in the company of others;" "On balance, I look back on my life with a sense of happiness;" "I feel full of energy these days."
People in the group who responded with "never or rarely" to each of the four statements were classified as having no enjoyment. Individuals who responded with "sometimes or often" to each of the four statements were categorized as having high enjoyment.
No high levels of life enjoyment on any occasion were seen in 2,264 (24 percent) of participants. A total of 1,833 (20 percent) participants had one, 2,063 (22 percent) had two, and 3,205 (34 percent) had three instances of high enjoyment.
During the follow-up period, there were 1,310 deaths. The death rate was progressively higher among individuals who reported fewer occasions of high enjoyment.
The investigators took a range of factors into account that could influence the results of the study, such as education, depressed mood, underlying health issues, and wealth.

Higher rates of life enjoyment associated with lower risk of death

Compared with the group that reported no enjoyment, the risk of death from all causes was 17 percent lower among participants who reported two instances of high enjoyment and 24 percent lower in those reporting three instances of high enjoyment of life.
Reports of high life enjoyment occurrences were greater in women, as well as in participants who were married or cohabiting, currently employed, well-educated, wealthier, and younger.
The study results confirmed the UCL team's hypothesis; the longer an individual reports enjoying life, the lower their risk of death. The authors write:

"These results add a new dimension to understanding the significance of subjective well-being for physical health outcomes by documenting a dose-response association with sustained well-being. This complements previous findings on well-being intensity, and demonstrating significant effects after controlling for a wide range of potential confounders."

In the study, the authors discuss that reverse cause-and-effect may bias the results. They say that, for a person with a serious illness, there can be a knock-on effect of a lack of enjoyment in life and, as a result, may increase the risk of death.
To avoid this bias, the researchers restricted deaths included in the analysis to at least 2 years after the last measurement point. However, limiting the data in this way made no difference to the overall findings.
"The findings highlight the need to study biological and behavioral mediators in order to establish the mechanisms through which subjective well-being is associated with health outcomes," the authors conclude. 

Older people who help and support others live longer. These are the findings of a study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, conducted by researchers from the University of Basel, Edith Cowan University, the University of Western Australia, the Humboldt University of Berlin, and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

Older people who help and support others are also doing themselves a favor. An international research team has found that grandparents who care for their grandchildren on average live longer than grandparents who do not. The researchers conducted survival analyses of over 500 people aged between 70 and 103 years, drawing on data from the Berlin Aging Study collected between 1990 and 2009.
In contrast to most previous studies on the topic, the researchers deliberately did not include grandparents who were primary or custodial caregivers. Instead, they compared grandparents who provided occasional childcare with grandparents who did not, as well as with older adults who did not have children or grandchildren but who provided care for others in their social network.
Emotional support
The results of their analyses show that this kind of caregiving can have a positive effect on the mortality of the carers. Half of the grandparents who took care of their grandchildren were still alive about ten years after the first interview in 1990. The same applied to participants who did not have grandchildren, but who supported their children -- for example, by helping with housework. In contrast, about half of those who did not help others died within five years.
The researchers were also able to show that this positive effect of caregiving on mortality was not limited to help and caregiving within the family. The data analysis showed that childless older adults who provided others with emotional support, for example, also benefited. Half of these helpers lived for another seven years, whereas non-helpers on average lived for only another four years.
Too intense involvement causes stress
"But helping shouldn't be misunderstood as a panacea for a longer life," says Ralph Hertwig, Director of the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. "A moderate level of caregiving involvement does seem to have positive effects on health. But previous studies have shown that more intense involvement causes stress, which has negative effects on physical and mental health," says Hertwig. As it is not customary for grandparents in Germany and Switzerland to take custodial care of their grandchildren, primary and custodial caregivers were not included in the analyses.
The researchers think that prosocial behavior was originally rooted in the family. "It seems plausible that the development of parents' and grandparents' prosocial behavior toward their kin left its imprint on the human body in terms of a neural and hormonal system that subsequently laid the foundation for the evolution of cooperation and altruistic behavior towards non-kin," says first author Sonja Hilbrand, doctoral student in the Department of Psychology at the University of Basel.

Looking on the bright side may do more than just help you get through tough times—it might actually help you live longer. In a new Harvard University study, women who had an optimistic outlook were less likely to die from several causes, including top killers like heart disease, cancer, and infection.

The study isn’t the first to make a connection between optimism and health benefits; other research has linked the positive-thinking personality trait to a lower risk of dying from cardiovascular problems, for example. But this is the first time it’s been associated with protection from other major illnesses.

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To reach these conclusions, researchers analyzed data from more than 70,000 women enrolled in the nationwide Nurses’ Health Study. The women answered survey questions about their health and mental state—including their outlook on life during uncertain times—and were followed for about eight years total.
During that time, women who ranked in the top quarter for optimism had a 29 percent lower risk of dying from any cause during the follow-up period, compared with those in the bottom quarter. Specifically, they had a 52 percent lower risk of dying from infection, a 39 percent lower risk of dying from stroke, a 38 percent lower risk of dying from heart or respiratory disease, and a 16 percent lower risk of dying from cancer.
"While most medical and public health efforts today focus on reducing risk factors for diseases, evidence has been mounting that enhancing psychological resilience may also make a difference," said co-lead author Eric Kim, PhD, research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in a press release. "Our new findings suggest that we should make efforts to boost optimism, which has been shown to be associated with healthier behaviors and healthier ways of coping with life challenges."

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This study was not able to prove a cause-and-effect relationship, and of course it would make sense that healthier people might also be more optimistic—or that optimistic people would take better overall care of themselves. But the researchers controlled for these scenarios as much as possible, by excluding participants who had an illness at the start of the study, or who died within the first two years.
And even after controlling for health conditions, depression, and healthy behaviors—such as eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, and not drinking excessively or smoking—the most optimistic women still had a 9 percent reduced risk of dying, compared to the least optimistic.
This suggests that, in addition to encouraging healthy behaviors, optimism may directly affect our biology, says Kim. Exactly how is unclear—but previous studies offer some potential clues, suggesting that the trait is associated with benefits such as healthier cholesterol, lower levels of inflammation, stronger immunity, and a slower rate of cellular aging.

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Perhaps the best news is that optimism is something we can all practice. Even if you’re naturally a glass half-empty type of person, studies show that a positive mindset can be learned and cultivated through relatively simple exercises.
One example could be “having people write down and think about the best possible outcomes for various areas of their lives, such as careers or friendships," says co-lead author and research fellow Kaitlin Hagan, PhD. "Encouraging use of these interventions could be an innovative way to enhance health in the future."

The usual feminist slogan is "Equal pay for equal work." But if you read a new study led by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, you may conclude that for female physicians, maybe the slogan should be "Equal pay for better work."

Because what it found is that among elderly Medicare patients in hospitals, female doctors tended to get better results. Their patients were likelier to live longer and less likely to land quickly back in the hospital.

The study analyzed records on more than 1.5 million hospitalizations of Medicare patients over four years, and it included more than 58,000 doctors, of whom nearly one-third were women. It looked at "30-day mortality" — whether patients died within 30 days of being treated — and whether they landed right back in the hospital.

Senior author and Harvard professor Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, sums up the results: "We found that when patients are hospitalized, when they receive care from a female physician, they're more likely to survive, and they're less likely to come back, than when their doctor is a man."

The effect wasn't huge. For example, the 30-day mortality rate was 11.07 percent for female physicians, compared with 11.49 percent for males, and the research found a similar gap on landing back in the hospital.

But the researchers projected out that gap for the general population and, Jha says, "We found that if male physicians achieved the same outcomes as female physicians, that would lead to about 32,000 fewer deaths every year. That's about the number of people who die in motor vehicle accidents. So from a public health point of view, it's important."

The study did not explore what the female doctors might be doing differently, but past research suggests that they are likelier to follow clinical guidelines and adhere to evidence-based medicine.

Jha says there's also some evidence from other industries that men are more likely to take risks, which could explain why the benefit of having a female doctor is especially pronounced in sicker patients. Research also finds that female doctors tend to be more effective at communicating with patients.

Might some unmeasured factors have tipped the study's scales? Perhaps male physicians' patients tend to be somehow different from female doctors'? The researchers used multiple methods to try to control for such potential confounders, Jha says. One angle: They looked at hospitalists, doctors who work in hospitals on shifts and are thus assigned patients largely at random, based only on where and when they work.

"And everywhere we looked, we found pretty consistently the same effect," Jha says. "And so I feel pretty confident that these findings are probably real."

The findings are also particularly striking given previous studies that found gaps in pay and promotions for female physicians. The pay disparity has been found within a given specialty, not just among specialties. Debates over those gaps have included some suggestions that female physicians may earn less because their work is somehow less valuable or not as good.

"Some of the reasons that have been given as rationalization for those differences are that the quality of women's work, for reasons related to child-bearing or more likely to work part-time, was lower," says Dr. Rita Redberg, the editor of JAMA Internal Medicine, in the journal's podcast. "And so certainly this study goes a long way to dispelling that rationalization."

Or as Jha puts it: "It's really important that this study says, 'No, no, despite that backdrop of lower salaries and less academic promotion, we're finding that not only are women physicians just as good, in fact we're finding that they're a little bit better.' "

"If you want to stave off death for as long as possible, you might want to reach for a tennis racquet," The Guardian reports.
A study looking at the impact of individual sports on mortality found racquet sports reduced the risk of death by around 47%.
Researchers also found reduced risks of death for people who took part in cycling, swimming and aerobics.
They didn't find such effects for people who took part in rugby, football or running – although this unexpected finding may be explained by the low number of deaths, which may have skewed the statistics. The smaller the data set, the bigger the chance of the data being influenced by chance.
While the researchers found taking part in some sports reduced the risk of death compared to not taking part, they did not directly compare the benefits of different sports. That means we can't say which sport is "best" for health.
What is clear from the study is that any sort of regular physical activity is likely to help us stay healthier and live longer.

Where did the story come from?

The study was carried out by researchers from the UKK Institute in Finland, University of Edinburgh, University of Oxford, Loughborough University and University of Exeter in the UK, Victoria University and University of Sydney in Australia, and University of Graz in Austria. No information about funding was provided.
The study was published in the peer-reviewed British Journal of Sports Medicine on an open-access basis, making it free to read online.
Most of the UK media reported that tennis and badminton were the "best" exercise, because people participating in these sports had the biggest reductions in risk of death compared to people not taking part.
However, these headlines ignore the fact that the effects of football and running were probably underestimated.

What kind of research was this?

This was a cohort study using information from eight health surveys in England and three surveys in Scotland, linked to data about deaths.
Cohort studies can spot links between factors such as taking part in exercise and length of life, but they can't prove that one factor causes another.

What did the research involve?

Researchers analysed questionnaires from 80,306 people. These people (average age 52, more than half women) were followed up for an average of nine years, and any deaths recorded.
After adjusting their figures to account for factors such as age, smoking and weight, researchers looked for links between how long people lived and whether they took part in a sport.
The questionnaires came from two big annual surveys, the Health Survey for England and the Scottish Health Survey. They used questionnaires from 11 years between 1994 and 2008. People were asked if they had taken part in any of the following sports during the past four weeks:

• cycling
• swimming
• aerobics, keep fit, gymnastics or dance for fitness (combined as aerobics)
• running or jogging (combined as running)
• football or rugby (combined as football)
• badminton, tennis or squash (combined as racquet sports)

For each of the sports included, researchers compared the chances of being alive at the end of the study, between people who said they took part in them with people who didn't take part in them.
They tried to account for the seasonal nature of sports like football and rugby by spreading the questionnaires year-round, but this may have missed some participants.
In addition to age, smoking and weight, researchers took account of how much other physical activity (outside of the named sports) people did, as well as the following confounders:

• long-term illness
• alcohol use
• mental health
• education level
• diagnosis of cardiovascular disease

What were the basic results?

Of the 80,306 people studied, 8,790 (10.9%) died during the average nine years of follow-up.
After adjusting their figures for confounding factors, researchers found that people who took part in sports had the following reduced chances of death during the study:

• 15% lower for cycling (hazard ratio (HR) 0.85, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.76 to 0.95)
• 28% lower for swimming (HR 0.72, 95% CI 0.65 to 0.80)
• 47% lower for racquet sports (HR 0.53, 95% CI 0.40 to 0.69)
• 27% lower for aerobics (HR 0.73, 95% CI 0.63 to 0.85)

They did not find a statistically significant reduced chance of death for people taking part in running or football.
They found reduced chances of death from heart disease or stroke for swimming, racquet sports and aerobics, but not for running, cycling or football.

How did the researchers interpret the results?

The researchers said their results "demonstrate that participation in specific sports may have significant benefits for public health". They said they had found "robust evidence" that swimming, racquet sports, cycling and aerobics were linked to reduced chance of death.
They acknowledge their findings on running were "surprising" in light of four big studies conducted previously. They suggest the low number of deaths among people who went running (68 of 4,012 runners, or 1.6%) could have prevented the statistical model from reaching statistical significance.
They also say that asking people about their participation in running during the past four weeks could have been misleading, so that those who jogged occasionally were included among those who ran regularly, year round. They say their result should be seen as adding to the body of evidence supporting running, rather than contradicting it.
Similarly for football, they say the results were "somewhat unexpected" and may reflect only the low numbers of people in the study who said they played football.

Conclusion

The overall conclusion we can take from this study is that taking part in sport or fitness activities is linked to a lower chance of death in a given period.
It's encouraging to see that a wide range of popular activities, including swimming, aerobics and cycling, are likely to be beneficial.
But we should be wary about comparing the types of different sports against each other. They weren't directly compared in the study and there may be reasons why results for some activities, such as football and running, were found to be statistically non-significant (potentially down to chance).
Statistician Professor David Spiegelhalter said that making a distinction between the sports was "simply not valid" and the differing results only reflected the small number of deaths among football players and runners.
The statistical uncertainty may have come about because of the way in which the results were adjusted to take account of confounding factors. For example, runners are likely to be non-smokers, younger, do more exercise overall and be leaner, compared to people who don't run – all of which will reduce their chances of death.
Once you've taken these factors into account, the additional impact of running may be hard to measure.
Professor Spiegelhalter points out that because this is an observational study, we can't really tell whether taking part in those sports where researchers did find a statistically significant result actually caused the lower death rate among participants.
He said it was "equally plausible" that "those at increased risk of death over the next few years are less likely to be healthy enough to play active sports now."
So what should people do as a result of the study?
The sensible advice seems to be to find a physical activity you enjoy – whether that's swimming, tennis, dancing, football or anything else that gets you out of breath – and take part. The more you enjoy an activity the greater the possibility that you will carry on doing it on a long-term basis.
While we can't say that one sport is better than others at helping you to live longer, evidence shows that physical exercise is likely to keep us fitter, healthier and happier for longer.
A new study could add to the argument over equal pay in the ranks of medicine: Older patients treated by female doctors tend to do better than those treated by males.
Public health researchers at Harvard found that elderly patients were less likely to die or be readmitted to the hospital within 30 days if treated by female doctors rather than male. The study doesn’t explain why this happens, but prior studies have found that female doctors tend to spend more time with patients, communicate better, and follow clinical guidelines more often than their male colleagues.
The findings not only launch a grenade at the gender pay gap in medicine, they also suggest the methods of female physicians — if replicated broadly — could significantly improve the quality of medical care in the United States.
“We need to understand why these differences exist … and figure out how to translate it to the broader population of physicians,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, a professor of health policy at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and senior author of the paper.

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White male doctors earn 35 percent more than black male doctors

The study, which examined data from more than 1 million Medicare beneficiaries, said that if male doctors achieved the same outcomes as female doctors, annual deaths of Medicare patients alone would drop by 32,000. That’s comparable to the number of annual deaths from car accidents in the US. Meanwhile, female physicians are still paid considerably less than males, according to recent research. A paper published this year in JAMA Internal Medicine found that male academic physicians get an average of 8 percent more than females, regardless of specialty, years of experience or productivity, which translates to an average salary bump of about $20,000, although the extent of the disparity varies widely. 
Jha said he hopes the study will spur constructive conversation. The wage gap “is particularly unconscionable given the performance of women in terms of providing high quality care,” he said.
Harvard’s study found that, when treated by female internists, Medicare patients had a 4 percent lower relative risk of dying prematurely and 5 percent lower risk of being readmitted to a hospital within 30 days. Researchers examined outcome data between 2011 and 2014 on the eight most common conditions in seniors treated by general internists, including sepsis, pneumonia, congestive heart failure, and acute renal failure.
Patients of female physicians had lower rates of mortality and readmission in all of the conditions examined, although the difference was not always statistically significant. Sepsis is a leading killer of elderly patients and costs more than $20 billion a year to treat. It killed about 182,000 people in the United States in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which launched a national campaign this year to improve treatment of the condition.
The study reported that mortality rates for sepsis were more than 2 percent lower among patients treated by female physicians, and about 1 percent lower for those treated for heart arrhythmia and pneumonia. Female doctors recorded about 1 percent lower readmissions for pneumonia and congestive heart failure. That might not seem like a big difference, but the costs add up quickly when applied to tens of thousands of patients with these conditions.
Jha said the researchers sought to control for a variety of factors, including risk adjusting for the demographics of patients and accounting for differences in the size and types of hospitals where the physicians worked. They also tested the findings by restricting the analysis to hospitalists, to whom patients are randomly assigned, to make sure patient selection of doctors was not skewing the results.
The outcomes remained consistent in that population as well.
“We spent quite a bit of time trying to make sure the findings were robust,” he said. “I feel very confident that findings are real and that it probably says something important about the way men and women are practicing.”

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Invisible women: Female doctors and health care leaders are being hidden in plain sight

Several studies have examined those differences in recent years in different types of physicians. Johns Hopkins researchers found that female primary care physicians engage in more communication that focuses on the individual needs of the patient; researchers also found they have longer visits than their male counterparts.
More effective communication has been linked with higher rates of patient satisfaction, lower readmissions, and better adherence to therapeutic recommendations. Hospitals nationwide are seeking to improve physicians’ communication with patients, especially as they face financial penalties for readmissions. The task is particularly challenging among elderly patients, who see an average of seven physicians a year across four different practices, according to the Institute of Medicine.   

Skip the Raw Veggie Platter?

Whenever you go to a party, it's there, smack dab in the middle of the table, that round plate the size of a trashcan cover with its nucleus of murky, gelatinous glop that's autologically referred to as dip.
Yes, it's the feared raw vegetable platter, the one you're compelled to sample in lieu of grabbing a handful of the crabby cheese wontons so people don't question your nutritional piety. Stupid raw vegetable platter.
Thanks to the Australians, though, you might not have as much reason to feel guilty about skipping it.

150,969 Australians Can't Be Wrong

The one thing that just about everyone can agree on is that eating fruits and vegetables is good for you, but just how good is always up for debate. In attempt to at least make a dent in solving that debate, scientists at the University of Sydney used data from more than a 150,000 Australians during the "Australian 45 and Up Study" and followed them for an average of 6.2 years.
They wanted to see exactly what lifestyle practices had the biggest impact on mortality. Those Aussies that ate the most fruits and vegetables scored well, but they often practiced other healthy habits, like maintaining a healthy weight, sleeping 7 to 9 hours a night, not being smokers, being physically active, etc.
However, when the scientists started to take a deeper look at the category of fruits and vegetables consumed, they noticed something really weird. Those Australians who ate the most fruit clearly were less likely to die. Vegetables had an effect on longevity, but it wasn't nearly as strong as the effect of fruits, which surprised the hell out of the investigators.
They then separated the vegetable group into two categories, raw and cooked. That's when they saw some gourd-blowing results. The Australians that cooked their vegetables – either by boiling, steaming, or even frying – had markedly LOWER mortality rates.

What in the World of Fried Asparagus Happened?

The researchers were flummoxed, but they at least came up with a guess, which is more than most PhD's are comfortable doing. They thought that maybe cooking, regardless of the method, makes more of the nutrients and bioactive substances in the vegetables available to human digestion. Still, they admitted that the "association of raw versus cooked vegetables in relation to mortality requires further investigation."
There's another possible point to consider. Most guys, when eating food, take one, possibly two more chews than a boa constrictor would, which is to say that they pretty much swallow their food whole. Without proper grinding and chewing, largely intact pieces of vegetable enter the digestive tract and are somewhat impervious to digestive juices, leaving many of their nutrients imprisoned in big chunks of zucchini, broccoli, rutabaga, etc.
All of that rings true, and it may give you ample reason to choose cooked over raw, but until scientists make further inroads into the raw vs. cooked debate, we should all be eating as many fruits and vegetables in general as we can tolerate.

Looking for a new hobby? Try tennis, swimming, or dance, and you may just extend your lifespan, suggests research published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. In an analysis of six sport and exercise categories, researchers found that people who pursued these activities actually lived longer than those who got their fitness on in other ways.

The study surveyed more than 80,000 adults in England and Scotland, ages 30 and up, who were asked about the physical activity they had done in the last four weeks. Along with things like housework and walking, they were also asked about racquet sports (such as badminton, tennis, and squash), swimming, aerobics (including dance and gymnastics), cycling, running and jogging, and football and rugby.
Participants were followed for about nine years, during which 8,790 people died, including 1,909 from heart disease or stroke. When the researchers compared mortality rates of people who did different sports (after taking into account factors such as age, gender, and medical history) they discovered a few interesting findings.
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In the racquet sports category, people who said they’d played in the past four weeks had a 47% lower risk of death from any cause compared to those who hadn't, as well as a 56% lower risk of death from heart disease or stroke.
People who swam and did aerobics also saw significant benefits compared to those who didn't: they were 28% and 27% less likely to die from any cause, respectively, and 41% and 36% less likely to die from heart disease and stroke.
Cycling gave participants a 15% lower risk of all-cause death compared to non-cyclists, but didn't offer protection against heart disease and stroke deaths.
The other sports did not appear to independently protect against death, from any cause or from cardiovascular problems—meaning that mortality rates of those who participated in them were not statistically different from those who didn’t.
There are some caveats, however. For runners and joggers, the researchers did find a 43% lower risk of all-cause death (and a 45% lower risk of cardiovascular death)—but that link disappeared when the results were adjusted for other factors (such as long-term illness, body mass index, drinking and smoking status, and weekly volume of other physical activity).
The relatively small number of deaths in the running group—and the fact that participants were only asked about activities they’d done in the last four weeks—may have skewed results, the researchers say. “It seems, therefore, that while not significant, our result adds to the body of evidence supporting beneficial effects of jogging/running on all-cause and [cardiovascular disease] mortality, rather than contradicting it,” they wrote.
As for football and rugby, only 6.4% of men and 0.3% of women had played these sports in recent weeks. Such a small sample size could explain why no benefit was seen in the study, say the researchers.
RELATED: 21 Reasons You'll Live Longer Than Your Friends
Still, the fact that only certain sports showed statistically meaningful benefits is worth investigating further, the researchers say. "Our findings indicate that it's not only how much and how often, but also what type of exercise you do that seems to make the difference," said senior author Emmanuel Stamatakis, PhD, associate professor of exercise, health, and physical activity at the University of Sydney, in a press release.
Of course, doing any type of exercise is still better than none. This is an especially important point, considering that only about 44% of study participants met the national guidelines for physical activity.
And speaking of how much and how often, participants were quizzed about frequency and duration of their exercises. They were also asked whether the activity was enough to make them breathless and sweaty. For some sports, it appeared that the longer and more intense the workouts, the better protection against death. For others, lower intensity seemed to be a better option.
But more research is needed, the authors say, since there weren't enough deaths for each intensity level to tease out meaningful trends. They also note that the study, as a whole, was only able to prove an association between different sports and longevity—and not necessarily a cause-and-effect relationship.

Taking care of people within—and beyond—your immediate family is associated with longer life expectancy for the caregiver, according to a new international study. The researchers used an evolutionary framework combined with a longitudinal aging study to examine whether engaging in prosocial behaviors towards both kin (biological relatives) and non-kin helped older adults stay healthier and live longer.
Based on the correlative evidence, the researchers concluded that caregiving within and beyond the family is associated with lower mortality for caregivers. The findings were published this week in the December 2016 journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
The researchers analyzed data from over 500 people aged between 70 and 103 years, who had participated in the Berlin Aging Studies (BASE) collected between 1990 and 2009. The collaborative study on the benefits of caregiving was conducted by researchers from the University of Basel, Edith Cowan University, the University of Western Australia, the Humboldt University of Berlin, and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
While analyzing the life expectancy data from BASE, researchers were intrigued to find that mortality rates for grandparents who participated in 'non-custodial childcare' of their grandchildren had a much lower rate of mortality than grandparents who did not provide childcare. This discovery corroborated what is known as the grandmother hypothesis. The association between caregiving and longevity were constant after controlling for physical health, age, socioeconomic status, and various characteristics of the children and grandchildren.
Notably, the life-extending benefits of caregiving were also observed in non-grandparents and adults without children who helped others within the community beyond their families.
In a statement to University of Basel, first author Sonja Hilbrand, doctoral student in the Department of Psychology said,

“It seems plausible that the development of parents’ and grandparents’ prosocial behavior toward their kin left its imprint on the human body in terms of a neural and hormonal system that subsequently laid the foundation for the evolution of cooperation and altruistic behavior towards non-kin.”

The "grandmother hypothesis" was formulated in the 1980s after Kristen Hawkes and James O'Connell had spent time living amongst the Hadza hunter-gatherers of north-central Tanzania. The researchers observed that most older women in the society spent their days gathering tubers and other food for their grandchildren and other youngsters within the tribe. Hawkes and her colleagues developed a groundbreaking 'grandmother theory' based on the notion that humans may have evolved to live longer lives because grandmothers were inherently proactive about helping to take care of her children's offspring.
The grandmother hypothesis also proposes that by taking responsibility for gathering food for her daughter's grandchildren, each daughter is able to have more children, more quickly. This hypothesis suggests that the most evolutionarily fit grandmothers will have the most grandchildren, thus passing on their longevity-promoting genes to more robust offspring in the next generation.

The grandmother hypothesis also proposes that by taking responsibility for gathering food for her daughter's grandchildren, each daughter is able to have more children, more quickly. This hypothesis suggests that the most evolutionarily fit grandmothers will have the most grandchildren, thus passing on their longevity-promoting genes to more robust offspring in the next generation.

Women account for just one-third of U.S. physicians, but the results of a new study suggests that’s not the only gender gap in medicine.

The study, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, aimed to see if health outcomes vary, if at all, among patients treated by women and men. Researchers analyzed results from Medicare patients treated by 58,344 physicians between 2011 and 2014. And the results showed patients treated by women had both a lesser risk of premature death (10.82% to men's 11.49% overall) and hospital readmissions within 30 days (15.01% to men's 15.57%).

The researchers estimated that approximately 32,000 fewer patients would die "if male physicians could achieve the same outcomes as female physicians every year," they wrote, based on Medicare hospitalizations. The report said that number would presumably be larger if the trend holds for non-Medicare patients.

Put simply, Ashish Jha, a study co-author and director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told Vox that a patient's "chances of dying are lower if your doctor is a woman."

 

While researchers sought to determine whether the differences in death and readmission rates could be based on male and female doctors having different types of patients or working in different areas, nothing the researchers controlled for could explain the disparity,

 A study out today in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that hospital patients who are treated by female physicians statistically live longer than those patients attended by male physicians.
Elderly patients treated by female physicians have a 5 percent better chance of living after getting out of the hospital. Put another way – if you were to replace all the male doctors in the study with women, 32,000 fewer people would die a year.
“I think the most surprising thing is that we found something. You know, why would gender matter,” said Dr. Anupam Jena, one of the study authors.
It may surprise some, considering the push for equality in the medical field.  Now here come these results that threaten to upend that notion, not with the prejudice of the past, but with data that is the future. The results are based on 1.5 million hospital patients and 58,000 doctors. But even with that, Jena said they wanted to be sure. So the team checked obvious explanations, like women keeping their patients in the hospital longer, different post-hospital referrals, or just spending more money.  
“None of those things emerged,” said Jena.
This is the first large study to look at how gender impacts patient outcomes. One thing to keep in mind is the effect is modest.
“The way to think about that is if you were a hospital administrator and you were going to reassign 149 patients to female physicians, then you might see this benefit of one life saved,” said University of Chicago’s Dr. Vineet Aurora, who is not affiliated with the research.
A modest impact may explain why most patients and staff I talked to at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston shrugged when I asked if they saw a difference between men and women. What did come up was the difference between good and bad doctors. Patient Tracy Nifford, who's been to the hospital 30 times just this year with an infection she can’t get in front of,  has seen a lot of both.

Tracy Nifford has been admitted to the hospital 30 times in 2016. - Dan Gorenstein/Marketplace

Fights with doctors over things like sending her home with antibiotics that didn’t work left Nifford near depleted.
“I was at a point in my life that I said, you know what, ‘I’m done,’” she said.
With this study, it’s easy to get stuck in some "war of the sexes" debate. But the point of this work is to refine the best way to practice medicine so all physicians can do better by their patients. Nifford said it’s enough to be sick and scared -- there’s no room for doctors who make life harder.
“As far as getting this fixed, I didn’t know what I would do. I was basically at the end of my rope,” she said. “I couldn’t take it anymore.”
For Nifford, what matters is doctors who listen, are empathetic and generous with time. And research suggests woman doctors tend to do that better than the men. But Jena’s instinct tells him what’s driving this statistical difference is how female physicians tend to approach problems and make decisions. He compares it to how he and his wife would rent a car and car seat for their toddler.
“The way I do that is I Google 'car service,' find the first thing that comes up and then I make a decision. She will go through probably five to ten different web pages, and look through all the Yelp reviews,” said Jena.
This study is not definitive. It’s a thread to pull to better understand the qualities that make up the best doctors. And odds are, that means looking more closely at the women than the men.

Volunteering time to care for elderly friends and neighbours could help them enjoy a longer life, according to new British research.
Carried out by the University of Aberdeen’s Business School, the study analysed mortality rates in Japanese seniors in the years following a major earthquake that struck Kobe in 1995.
The event led to a huge surge in the number of volunteers providing daily care over a long-term period to elderly residents in earthquake-hit areas, with around 1.4 million people volunteering to help those affected.
Voluntary care for the elderly included visits to homes for a chat and assistance with daily tasks.
As well as collecting the data on volunteers, Dr Yu Aoki, who carried out the research, also compared the mortality rates of the elderly in the affected areas to nearby unaffected areas.
The results showed that mortality was significantly lower in areas where rates of volunteering were high.
While previous studies have looked at the health benefits of volunteering on volunteers, this study is the first to prove a causal link between volunteering and the longevity of recipients.
Dr Aoki commented on the results, saying, “The findings of this research underline the very real value of volunteering to help elderly people who might otherwise be struggling with a lack of daily support or loneliness.
“The study also has important implications for societies with ageing populations that face a growing healthcare challenge, and suggests that governments can consi- der doing more to encourage vo- lunteering as a means to provide the elderly with care.”