A team of researchers from UCL, De Montfort University Leicester and St George’s University, Grenada, studied data collected by the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA), which collects information from people aged over 50 to understand aspects of growing old.
The study, published today in PLOS ONE, has been running since 2002 giving the research team a large database to analyse.
They found that a person with an average age of 67, who takes part in mild physical activity or is sedentary and is a current or previous smoker had a 59% chance of becoming frail by the time they were 79.
In contrast, a person of the same age, who took part in moderate or vigorous physical activity, who had never smoked had a 22% chance of becoming frail over the same period.
Read more at University College London
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