There's good news for joggers: Pounding the pavement can add years to your life.
Jogging on a regular basis can extend the life expectancy of men by 6.2 years and women by 5.6 years, according to an assessment of data from the ongoing Copenhagen City Heart Study.
But, better still, you don't have to run to excess to reap the rewards. The analysis revealed that between one and 2.5 hours a week of running at a slow to moderate pace is enough to boost life expectancy.
The merits of jogging were not always apparent, noted Peter Schnohr, one of the researchers at Bispebjerg University Hospital in Denmark's capital. Back in the 1970s, when jogging started growing in popularly, there were concerns it might be dangerous. After some men died while running, "various newspapers suggested that jogging might be too strenuous for ordinary middle-aged people," said Dr. Schnohr. And the occasional death of a marathon runner has rekindled the controversy.
"We can say with certainty that regular jogging increases longevity," Dr. Schnohr said in a statement released with the findings presented this week at a medical conference in Dublin.
The Copenhagen City Heart Study, which started in 1976, has been used as the basis of more than 750 scientific papers. For the jogging sub-study, the researchers compared the life spans of 1,116 male joggers and 762 female joggers with non-joggers. The study participants had also completed detailed questionnaires, so the researchers knew how often and how fast the joggers ran.