HEALTH TRENDS
Published:Wednesday | November 6, 2013 | 12:00 AM
Elderly exercisers have fewer broken bones after falls
Older adults who have a regular exercise routine are less likely to fall, but if they do, they're also less likely to get hurt, a new study suggests. Researchers found that older adults taking part in fall-prevention exercise programmes were about 37 per cent less likely to be injured during a fall, compared to non-exercising participants. Those injuries could be anything from bruises to broken bones.
The study's lead author, Fabienne El-Khoury, and her colleagues used data from 17 previous studies comparing 2,195 people assigned to take part in exercise programmes and 2,110 people who were not. The average age of the people included in the analysis was about 77 years old, and more than three-quarters of the participants were women.
The exercisers were 61 per cent less likely to have broken bones after falls, and 43 per cent less likely to experience a fall leading to any injury serious enough to warrant admission to a hospital.
It was also suggested that the minds of people who exercise may also be sharper than those of non-exercisers, and they can respond better to falling, for instance, by grabbing onto something.
Smoking really does make you look older, a twin study confirms
A new study of twins is showing smoking makes you look older than you really are. Researchers used the annual Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, to round up the 79 identical pairs they included in the report. A panel of three plastic surgery residents compared the faces of the twins, one of which had been smoking for at least five years longer than the other. The twins who smoked just five fewer years than their siblings had younger-looking faces, the study showed.
The researchers identified a few major areas of accelerated ageing in the faces of the smoking twins: The smokers' upper eyelids drooped while the lower lids sagged, and they had more wrinkles around the mouth. The smokers were also more likely to have jowls, according to the study, which was published last week in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.
Smoking reduces oxygen to the skin, which also decreases blood circulation, and that can result in weathered, wrinkled, older-looking skin, stated Dr Bahman Guyuron, a plastic surgeon in Cleveland, Ohio, and the lead author of the study.
"We tell people, as soon as they stop smoking, the repair begins not only to their skin, but their lungs, their heart vessels - it starts to repair itself," noted Dr Robin Ashinoff, medical director of dermatologic surgery at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey.