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VITAL SIGNS
It’s that time of year for your annual wellness visit. Your blood pressure is good. Your heart and lungs sound good. You get a clean bill of health from your doctor. How many of you have had this experience? Feels good, doesn’t it? But are these numbers an accurate measure of your continued daily health and how long you may expect to live?
Commonly, your heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, BMI (body mass index) and body temperature are used as markers of health, but they may be better markers of wellness and not long-term health.
The American health care system and wellness industries place moderate value on body mass index (BMI). Body weight is made up of both fat and muscle. BMI cannot differentiate between the two. And as far as your health is concerned, the enemy is body fat, not muscle. The ability of BMI to predict mortality and disease is questionable. BMI predicts disease risk; it’s not a diagnostic health tool.
No one single number will give you a good idea of whether you are functionally healthy or not. Here are five alternative vital signs that you can easily measure and test today:
1. The speed at which you walk. This can be an effective predictor of health status. The Journal of the American Medical Association studied 35,000 people over the age of 65. Those who could walk faster than 2.6 feet/second or one mile in 33 minutes were likely to hit the average life expectancy of 78 years. With every speed increase of ~4 inches per second, the chance of dying in the next decade fell by 12 percent.
2. The strength of a person’s grip. In 2018, Strand and colleagues studied 500,000 middle aged people and found that conditions such as lung cancer and heart disease were well predicted by a person’s grip strength. It was a better predictor of mortality than blood pressure or overall physical activity. Another study by Celis-Morales and colleagues found that grip strength of people in their 80’s positively predicted the likelihood of making it past the age of 100. This is something to consider the next time you go to open a jar.
3. Ability to perform a push up. In 2019, The Journal of the American Medical Association made headlines with a study about push up ability predicting heart disease. Micheal Joyner of the Mayo Clinic reports that the push up study demonstrates the idea that whole body exercise capacity may be a better predictor of longevity and a metric for evaluating work readiness and health. (Surprisingly, only 20-30% of Americans can do a single push up!)
4. Sit to Stand test. A longevity test devised by a team of Brazilian researchers and published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, is proven to be predictive of how long you'll live—or, to be more accurate, of how long you won't. The test is simple to perform: Just sit on the floor from a standing position without using your hands, arms, or knees to slow your descent. Then stand back up—without using your hands, arms, or knees to help boost you back up, if possible. Those who need to use hand and knees to get up and down, were 7 times more likely to die within the next 6 years vs those can could get up and down without support.
5. Your waist circumference. If body fat is stored around the waist rather than the hips, you’re at an increased risk for obesity related health issues. A high BMI coupled with a large waist circumference greatly increases health risk. A large waist circumference is defined as 40 inches or higher for men and 35 inches or higher for women. Instructions to measure waist circumference from the NIH: “To correctly measure your waist, stand and place a tape measure around your middle, just above your hipbones. Measure your waist just after you breathe out.”
So put down the magazine for a moment and give these tests a try!