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For long, happy life, keep busy

By TIMES WIRES
Published July 25, 2006

Two recent medical reports shed light on the benefits for older people of staying active.

A Purdue University researcher has found that keeping busy and active might aid a positive relationship between aging parents and their adult children.

Karen Fingerman, an associate professor of child development and family studies, led a team that studied parents and children and their conflicting emotions about each other.

"We initially predicted that people who had more demands on their time would have trouble staying close to their family," Fingerman said. "Instead, we found that those demands actually enrich the relationships: Busy people were more positive and focused less attention on others' faults."

On the other hand, she said, the study found that the family of these busy individuals may have mixed emotions - disappointment that they don't see more of each other but happiness that the other person is fulfilled and independent.

"Parents feel less conflicting emotions when their offspring have . . . achieved roles of adulthood, such as a successful marriage or being a parent," Fingerman said.

The study involved 158 families with a son or daughter age 22 to 49 who lived in a separate household.

Participants rated the importance of their roles as parent or offspring, romantic partner or spouse, and as a worker. They also rated how important their parent or offspring was relative to other people they care about. Finally, they rated their positive and negative feelings for their parents or grown child.

The researchers think the mixture of positive and negative feelings, with their conflicting emotions, helps explain how tensions and positive feelings can co-exist.

The research, called the Adult Family Study, was published in the May issue of the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences. A co-author is Elizabeth Hay, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of Florida.

Another new study documents that being more physically active is associated with lower risk of mortality for older adults.

The study, published earlier this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is thought to be the first to use a specific, objective measure of energy expenditure to determine whether expending that energy is related to longevity.

Previous studies have found that older adults with low levels of physical activity are at higher risk of mortality than those who report higher activity levels. However, those studies relied on subjective reports of physical activity.

In contrast, the researchers in this new study measured resting metabolic rates and carbon dioxide production - a direct measure of total energy use - to assess individuals' energy use through usual daily activity. This measurement was then linked to death rates.

The researchers, with the National Institute on Aging (NIA), assessed this daily energy expenditure in 302 adults, ages 70 to 82.

The third of study participants who spent the most energy had a significantly lower mortality risk than the third who spent the least.

Those participants who used the most energy were more likely than those who used less energy to work for pay or to climb stairs. But this most "energetic" group still was no more likely to do high-intensity exercise, even to walk for exercise, to volunteer or to serve as caregivers.

This research is part of the NIA Dynamics of Health, Aging and Body Composition Study. The NIA leads the federal research on aging and the health of older people and is part of the National Institutes of Health.

[Last modified July 24, 2006, 21:09:53]