New Study: Get a (Healthy) Life : Best health care reform begins at home
For years, medical experts have been quietly urging people to take more control over their own health needs, the better to prevent illnesses and to lengthen life and improve its quality. What has always been good advice deserves now to become an imperative.
One of the most striking pieces of evidence to support that conclusion comes in a new study of the causes of death in the United States in 1990. Published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Assn., the study finds that personal behavioral choices were directly involved in well over 40% of all deaths that year. Coming as no surprise whatever, tobacco was determined to be the leading contributor to fully 400,000 of the 2.1 million deaths recorded. “Diet and activity patterns,” mainly meaning eating too much saturated fat and not getting enough exercise, were implicated in 300,000 deaths. Alcohol played a role in 100,000. Firearms, unsafe sexual behavior, motor vehicles and illicit drugs accounted for more than 100,000 deaths.
What kind of deaths? The ones we have come to expect from study after study. From tobacco: deaths from heart disease, stroke, a variety of cancers and low birth weights. From improper diet and a lack of exercise: deaths from stroke, diabetes and colon cancer. From alcohol: deaths from liver and heart disease, accidents and intentional violence.
“The most important lesson of this study is that it’s really not heart disease and cancer and stroke that kill Americans,” said Dr. J. Michael McGinnis of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who co-authored the study with William Foege of the Carter Presidential Center. “It’s tobacco and dietary and activity patterns and other factors over which people have some control.” That is the considerable sign of hope is this otherwise grim accounting of the costs of self-abuse. For where control is possible, deadly habits can be changed, whether it’s smoking, with its appalling killing rate, or the failure to use seat belts or substitute even a minimum level of activity for sedentary living.
It’s very important, we think, that whatever health care plan emerges from Congress next year give full weight to the need to promote good health habits and prevent disease, not simply to treating illness once it has appeared. Hundreds of thousands of Americans die prematurely each year from bad habits, partly out of ignorance, partly out of willful imprudence, and the economic costs to the nation are staggering. The evidence is unmistakable that informed self-control can do a lot to prolong life and eliminate much of that cost.
