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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2160 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 27, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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New Swedish twin study just dropped[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10274991/

Maybe exercising doesn't matter all that much?

Results

We identified four classes of long-term LTPA: sedentary, moderately active, active and highly active. Although biological ageing was accelerated in sedentary and highly active classes, after adjusting for other lifestyle-related factors, the associations mainly attenuated. Physically active classes had a maximum 7% lower risk of total mortality over the sedentary class, but this association was consistent only in the short term and could largely be accounted for by familial factors. LTPA exhibited less favourable associations when prevalent diseases were exclusion criteria rather than covariate.

Conclusion

Being active may reflect a healthy phenotype instead of causally reducing mortality.

I both want this to be true (because it would be a relief, in a way) but also don't (because it means your mortality isn't really modifiable by exercise). Any good analyses/critiques available?

  1. On Jun 5th 2023. So not that new.

One thing that I don't understand how to deal with is

Alcohol use was based on average alcohol consumption (g/day) in 1981 of beer, wine and spirits[25] and classified as never, former, occasional (>0.1 and <1.3 g), low (≥1.3 and <25 g), medium (≥25 and <45 g), high (≥45 and <65 g) and very high (≥65 g)[26].

Body mass index (BMI) (kg/m2) was calculated based on self-reported height and weight in 1981. BMI based on self-reports has been shown to agree well with BMI based on measured values[23].

They assessed these in 1981 and maybe tried to control for them? But the study ran through 2020? Why only check these once? What's the impact either way? I flip between "maybe this doesn't matter at all" and "doesn't this render the study findings highly suspect enough that you should feel bad for submitting it for print at all?"

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