Bad habits 'cut your life by 12 years'

 | News.com.au

A KILLER quartet of unhealthy behaviours - smoking, drinking, poor diet and inactivity - can slash average lifespan by 12 years, but lifestyle changes can help stem the damage, researchers have discovered.

Individuals who engaged in all four high-risk behaviours suffered three times the death rate for cancer and heart disease, and four times the death rate from other causes, as people who engaged in none of the behaviours, according to research published in Monday's issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

Researchers studied 4886 people 18 or older in 1984 and 1985, and assigned a health behaviour score for each person based on their participation in the bad behaviours: a score of four for someone who engaged in all four unhealthy behaviours, and zero for people who did none of them.

In essence, the higher the score, the shorter the average lifespan, according to the authors.

Over an average 20 years of follow-up, 1080 of the participants died - 431 from cardiovascular disease, 318 from cancer and 331 from other causes. Compared with participants who had none of the poor health behaviours, the risk of death increased with each additional poor behaviour, the authors wrote.

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A person with a score of four has "an overall death risk equivalent to being 12 years older'' than someone who engages in none of the poor behaviours, the study said.

"To fully understand the public health impact of these behaviours, it is necessary to examine both their individual and combined impact on health outcomes,'' said Elisabeth Kvaavik of the University of Oslo, one of the study's authors.