Is Anyone Truly Healthy?
By YORK UNIVERSITY
A new
long-term study of population-level data shows that when it comes to health,
pretty much everyone could make improvements, plus the relationship with risk
factors and mortality changes over time, sometimes in surprising ways.
“You can take this as a good news story or a bad news story, depending on how you want to look at these numbers,” says Faculty of Health Associate Professor with the School of Kinesiology and Health Science Jennifer Kuk, lead author of the study.
“What we discovered is that the relationship with risk factors and
mortality changes over time, which could be explained by factors such as
evolution in treatments and changes in social stigma. Overall, most of us have
something wrong with us, and we’re more likely to have a lifestyle health-risk
factor now than in the ’80s and that’s actually associated with even greater
mortality risk now than before.”
The research, published recently in the journal PLOS One, took United States survey data from 1988 to 1994 and 1999 to 2014, and looked at the five-year mortality odds for people 20 or older.
The research team looked at 19 different risk factors and then adjusted the data for age, sex, obesity category and ethnicity. What they found overall was that less than three percent of people had none of the risk factors.
While previous research has
documented the risk factors very well, Kuk says what was less understood was
the relationship between various risks and the likelihood for mortality over
time. Kuk and the research team found that that relationship could sometimes be
paradoxical.
For example, says Kuk, rates of smoking, long linked to conditions that can lead to death such as cancer, heart disease, stroke and diabetes, have overall decreased thanks to strong public-health campaigns.
However, the overall risk
of being a smoker increased over time, which Kuk says could perhaps be
explained by increased stigma as the addiction became less common and awareness
of risks grew, which may also be reflected in research funding.
“If you look at cancer research, there’s a lot of funding overall, but specifically for lung cancer, it seems to be associated with moral fault and as a consequence lower funding,” says Kuk. “When you look at the mortality risk associated with having lung cancer relative to all the other common cancers, it’s extremely high. So I think that this lack of push is detrimental.”
Kuk’s
main area of research is obesity, and here she found that while the prevalence
has gone up, the risks have gone down.
“Even
though there are more and more people with obesity, it’s actually not resulting
in more deaths over time. And so I think that that’s another clear thing we
need to recognize, that we’re very good at treating the outcomes associated
with obesity. And regardless of what our body weight is, most of us have
something that we can probably work on.”
Some of
the other health trends that Kuk found in the data include:
- Diabetes and hypertension rates have gone up over time, but risks
have gone down.
- More people aren’t exercising, and this is now related to worse
outcomes than it once was.
- Being on mental-health medications was not a significant risk factor
in the 1980s, but in the later dataset was associated with increased
mortality.
- Not finishing high school is associated with health risks, while it
was not in the 1980s.
While
Kuk says the research points to nearly all of us having room for improvement
when it comes to various factors like diet, exercise, smoking, alcohol, and
drug intake, she also says that there are factors that are out of many people’s
individual control.
“When we
look at things like food insecurity, low education — as a society, we’re making
it so that health might not be an easy choice for a lot of people. We need to
be sensitive to that when we take a look at these risk factors.”
Reference:
“Is anyone truly healthy? Trends in health risk factors prevalence and changes
in their associations with all-cause mortality” by Winnie W. Yu, Rubin Pooni,
Chris I. Ardern and Jennifer L. Kuk, 2 June 2023, PLOS ONE.
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0286691
