Older women looking to extend their lifespan to the age of 90 or beyond should focus on maintaining a stable weight. A recent multi-institutional study found that older women who maintained a stable body weight after 60 were more likely to reach their 90th birthdays.
The study involved 54,437 women from the Women’s Health Initiative. The researchers looked at short-term and long-term weight changes in women and compared that to the age they reached.
The researchers found that women who experienced unintentional weight loss had 51% lower odds of reaching 90. While weight loss was associated with decreased longevity, a weight gain of 5% or more did not contribute to exceptional longevity, which points toward the importance of maintaining a stable weight. The study was published in the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences. This study aimed to analyze any associations between weight changes (intentional or unintentional) and exceptional longevity in older women. The authors noted that prior studies analyzed the effects of weight loss in early to middle adulthood, such as shifting from being a person with obesity to being overweight, but that these studies had not considered whether the weight loss was intentional.
The UCSD study included nearly 55,000 postmenopausal women who participated in the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study, which began in 1991. The WHI study focused on health issues in postmenopausal women, such as heart disease and cancer. The authors chose to use data from women who were ages 61 to 81 at the time of enrolling in the study. The women provided information, including their weight, medical conditions, alcohol consumption, and smoking status. The researchers looked at weight changes from the beginning of each participant’s enrollment and later at the 3-year and 10-year marks. They categorized the women into one of three groups: The authors also classified the women into “intentional weight loss” or “unintentional weight loss groups” at the 3-year weigh-in, depending on whether they reported losing more than 5 pounds on purpose.
