Giving Old Age a Run for Its Money : Health: Forget the Fountain of Youth. Early results of a USC study show that regular exercise may be the best way to forestall some of the consequences of aging.
As both a competitive runner in his 70s and as the president of a charity, Ed Stotsenberg seized the moment when USC gerontology researchers came to him for a funding grant.
“I said, ‘Why don’t you study old runners like me?’ ” recalls Stotsenberg, 78, president of the Mary Pickford Foundation, a major donor to gerontological research.
“Find out what a healthy person is supposed to look like at this age,” exhorted Stotsenberg, who told the researchers that he still felt “just as good as I did at 25.”
His curiosity has translated into an intriguing long-term study on how aging affects athletes.
The study, which began in 1987, features almost 200 masters athletes--people 40 and older who compete in at least one sanctioned event each year. If the study unfolds as planned, the youngest of these athletes will be studied for at least 20 years.
At that point, researchers hope that they can describe how those people who attempt to stay fit can forestall some of the consequences of aging.
“We want to know what the normal aging rate is for active people,” says USC professor Robert Wiswell, director of the study. “We know lots more about younger athletes and older inactive people than we do about older active people.”
In other words, just how old and how fit can we become?
The study has already dropped some tantalizing hints: Speed and muscle strength may endure longer than assumed. Athletic performance may not decline significantly until age 60.
“We have no evidence that age sets a limit on fitness,” Wiswell says. “Are these people (in the study) the exception, or are people who are inactive capable of doing this but are just not motivated?”
“This is an area of research that is only now beginning to develop,” says Dr. James Cooper, a geriatrician at the National Institute on Aging. “We probably know less about the serious athlete, the marathon runner or the person who maintains a high level of fitness” than about older inactive people.
What research does show, says Cooper, is that 40% of people older than 65 are sedentary. Those 60% who do some degree of exercise have a lower death rate, have fewer falls and injuries, and are more mobile than their peers.
“There is nothing that can retard the aging process as much as exercise,” Cooper says.
Wiswell hopes that the study will put some muscle behind the government’s highly publicized Healthy People 2000 program, which advocates lifelong exercise to prevent disease and to promote mobility and independence well into old age.
“We prescribe exercise because we think it’s important. The problem is we have no studies on normal, active, older men and women to show how much exercise is beneficial,” he says.
The USC study might lead to concrete recommendations for the intensity, frequency and duration of exercise for older people.
In a high-tech, basement laboratory on the USC campus, Louis Beatle sits on a robotic contraption that will measure his muscle strength. A runner, Beatle, 65, has the look of an athlete: trim physique, bulging biceps and a youthful air.
This morning, he will undergo about six tests that will encompass almost 60 measurements of his health, including a physical, an electrocardiogram, a muscle biopsy, and blood, strength, treadmill and body composition tests.
Each of the 132 men and 63 women in the study are examined once every two years. Each subject also provides researchers with information on their diets, exercise habits and competition scores or times.
Some of the athletes are undergoing their third exams. And although it’s too early to draw conclusions, Wiswell believes that many myths about fitness in the elderly will be shattered by his group.
“We underestimate the ability of older people. We hold them back,” he says.
It’s a standard belief in physiology that after ages 22 to 25, people begin losing function in most of the organ systems at a rate of about 1% per year, or about 10% per decade, Wiswell says. Other research indicates that men typically lose about one-half pound of lean tissue but gain one pound of weight per year after 35. Women gain a half-pound of weight per year and lose about one-third of a pound of lean tissue.
But, so far, Wiswell’s subjects appear to be altering this picture of decline. Some subjects who have been tested three times have shown no loss of aerobic capacity over five years, he says, indicating the lungs and heart may not be losing function as quickly as people thought they might.
For example, one man who ran the 100-yard dash in 10 seconds at age 20 now clocks 12 seconds for the same distance at age 60.
“That’s a 20% loss in time, but it’s also less than the 1% per year you would expect,” Wiswell says.
In general, people who participate in endurance events seem to experience more rapid declines in performance than those in speed events, countering a common belief that the first thing an athlete loses is speed.
“Our study shows the longer you go (in an event), the greater the impact age has on it,” he says.
Muscle strength can also probably be maintained longer than once thought. For example, Wiswell says, it’s typically believed that 30 to 35 are the peak years for performance in power weightlifting. But a 43-year-old man recently set a world record in the event.
Many of the USC masters athletes show surprising consistency in their physical performance from 40 to 65 before a decline occurs, Wiswell says. This also runs counter to the belief that physical performance improves until about 35 before a steady decline sets in.
“We find minimal changes in the 40s and 50s. Whereas we used to think that a downhill slope in performance would be fairly rapid after age 35, that function goes up to a certain point and then it goes down,” Wiswell says.
“We’re saying now that there is a gradual slope up, a long period of reasonable stability, and then a gradual loss. We think that plateau period is broadening because of increased exercise habits.”
By looking at bone scans, blood samples and EKG strips, Wiswell expects to find some of the reasons fitness can be maintained at a high level as people age.
For example, studies have shown that 25% of the body’s fast-twitch muscle fiber, which is responsible for speed, is lost as we grow older. By taking small samples of tissue from the quadriceps of his athletes, Wiswell wants to see how many fast-twitch fibers remain and to measure their size.
“The loss of fast-twitch fibers is one of the excuses of why you lose (speed) as you get older. But if you keep active, does that loss occur? We don’t have any answers yet,” he says.
Wiswell and his team of student assistants are also interested in how exercise might affect a woman’s risk of the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis.
Studies in younger women indicate that running does not prevent bone loss. And, picking up an X-ray of one of the female runners in his study, Wiswell points to a spine almost devoid of the calcium deposits that keep bones strong. But this woman has no symptoms of osteoporosis.
Wiswell says his study may show that maintaining muscle strength may be one way to counter the effects of aging bones.
The study will also look at the effects of injuries and other health problems, such as cardiac arrhythmia, on fitness and performance.
“We want to know what sets a limit on performance aside from aging,” he says.
Like any jocks, the subjects of the USC study are keenly interested in how they compare from one examination to the next. But none need to be convinced that exercising is postponing at least some of the effects of aging.
Dorothy Stotsenberg, 78, took up running after watching her husband compete in international masters events.
“I keep improving,” says Dorothy, who runs the 400, 800 and 1,500 meters. “My speed hasn’t changed much, but I’ve improved in other areas of my health. The older I get, the better I get.”
Many of the study subjects are runners, with some swimmers and field athletes. Jack Bishin, 91, is the oldest. He recently gave up his driver’s license, but he can complete five kilometers in 40 to 50 minutes on foot.
“Those people (at USC) keep telling me that I’m doing as well now as I did five years ago,” he says.
Gary Miller, 55, a Glendale dentist and world champion masters decathlete, says he has lost “a tenth of a second” over the years but has retained the same level of lean body mass and other measures of good health.
“I’m very pleased with that,” says Miller, whose wife, Christel, 57, is a national masters champion in the high, long and triple jump. “When I stop and think about myself compared to my colleagues, I might be considered a freak.”
Ed Stotsenberg, who began running 15 years ago, also says he’s surprised by his fitness level. He says he has lost weight, eats better and sleeps more soundly.
“I never thought I could do this. And I can’t believe how fast I can run,” he says. “Eventually, even the runners start falling apart. It doesn’t give you life eternal. But as long as you do live, you’re in much better shape.”
