A great deal of funding and effort goes into attempts to quantify the effects of lifestyle choices on long-term health, incidence of disease, and age-related mortality. Perhaps more than is useful, given what we know about the limits of the possible. Exercise improves the quality of later life, but you can’t exercise your way out of being physically aged and ultimately dying from age-related disease. Animal studies demonstrate that some forms of treatment, such as senolytics, can achieve degrees of delay or reversal of aspects of aging beyond that of any lifestyle choice. Research attention might be better focused on that sort of exploration. Further, one might argue that more data on the benefits of a better lifestyle is not actionable: it doesn’t instruct us to do anything that we didn’t already know that we should be doing. Still, today’s open access paper is representative of a sizable body of work and ongoing effort on the…
Better Lifestyle Choices Correlate with a Lower Burden of White Matter Damage in the Brain
A great deal of funding and effort goes into attempts to quantify the effects of lifestyle choices on long-term health, incidence of disease, and age-related mortality. Perhaps more than is useful, given what we know about the limits of the possible. Exercise improves the quality of later life, but you can’t exercise your way out of being physically aged and ultimately dying from age-related disease. Animal studies demonstrate that some forms of treatment, such as senolytics, can achieve degrees of delay or reversal of aspects of aging beyond that of any lifestyle choice. Research attention might be better focused on that sort of exploration. Further, one might argue that more data on the benefits of a better lifestyle is not actionable: it doesn’t instruct us to do anything that we didn’t already know that we should be doing. Still, today’s open access paper is representative of a sizable body of work and ongoing effort on the…