Striving4Zen

People who want to live a long and healthy life might want to take up running.

A study published yesterday shows middle-aged members of a runner's club were half as likely to die over a 20-year period as people who did not run. Running reduced the risk not only of heart disease, but of cancer and neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's, researchers at Stanford University found.

"At 19 years, 15% of runners had died, compared with 34% of controls [non-runners]," Dr. Eliza Chakravarty and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Any type of vigorous exercise will likely do the trick, said Stanford's Dr. James Fries, who worked on the study.

The team surveyed 284 members of a nationwide running club and 156 similar, healthy people as controls. They all had similar social and economic backgrounds, and all were 50 or older.

Starting in 1984, each volunteer filled out an annual survey on exercise frequency, weight and disability for eight activities.

Most of the volunteers did some exercise, but runners exercised as much as 200 minutes a week, compared to 20 minutes for the non-runners.

At the beginning, the runners were leaner and less likely to smoke compared with the controls. And they exercised more over the whole study period in general.

SOURCE

Labels: exercise, healthy living, runner's high, running, study

Throughout the world, amateurs, experts and the media agree that prolonged jogging raises people's spirits. And many believe that the body's own opioids, so called endorphins, are the cause of this. But this has never been proved until now.

Researchers at the Technische Universität München and the University of Bonn succeeded to demonstrate the existence of an 'endorphin driven runner's high'.

In an imaging study they were able to show, for the first time, increased release of endorphins in certain areas of the athletes' brains during a two-hour jogging session. Their results are also relevant for patients suffering from chronic pain, because the body's own opiates are produced in areas of the brain which are involved in the suppression of pain. The researchers, some of whom are also members of the German Research Network of Neuropathic Pain, which is also funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, thereby show that jogging not only makes you high, but can also relieve pain. The results of the study have now been published in the scientific journal Cerebral Cortex.

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Labels: endorphins, exercise, healthy living, runner's high, running, study