Abstract
Whether a healthy lifestyle helps achieve gains in life expectancy (LE) free of major non-communicable diseases and its share of total LE in Chinese adults remains unknown. We considered five low-risk lifestyle factors: never smoking or quitting for reasons other than illness, no excessive alcohol use, being physically active, healthy eating habits and healthy body fat levels. Here we show that after a median follow-up of 11.1 years for 451,233 Chinese adults, the LE free of cardiovascular diseases, cancer and chronic respiratory diseases (95% confidence interval) at age 40 years for individuals with all five low-risk factors was on average 6.3 (5.1–7.5) years (men) and 4.2 (3.6–5.4) years (women) longer than those with 0–1 low-risk factors. Correspondingly, the proportion of disease-free LE to total LE increased from 73.1% to 76.3% for men and from 67.6% to 68.4% for women. Our findings suggest that promoting healthy lifestyles could be associated with gains in disease-free LE in the Chinese population.
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Data availability
CKB data are available to all bona fide researchers. Details of how to access and details of the data release schedule are available from www.ckbiobank.org/site/Data+Access. As stated in the access policy, the CKB study group must maintain the integrity of the database for future use and regulate data access to comply with prior conditions agreed with the Chinese government. Data security is an integral part of CKB study protocols. Data can be released outside the CKB research group only with appropriate security safeguards.
Code availability
Analysis code for this study is available at https://github.com/qiufen-code/Lifestyle-and-disease-free-LE.
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Acknowledgements
The most important acknowledgement is to the participants in the study and the members of the survey teams in each of the ten regional centres, as well as to the project development and management teams based at Beijing, Oxford and the ten regional centres. This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (82192904 (J.L.), 82192901 (L.L.), 82192900 (L.L.) and 81941018 (J.L.)). The CKB baseline survey and the first resurvey were supported by a grant from the Kadoorie Charitable Foundation in Hong Kong. The long-term follow-up is supported by grants from the UK Wellcome Trust (212946/Z/18/Z, 202922/Z/16/Z, 104085/Z/14/Z and 088158/Z/09/Z) (Z.C.), grants (2016YFC0900500 (Y.G.)) from the National Key R&D Program of China, National Natural Science Foundation of China (81390540 and 91846303) (L.L.) and Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (2011BAI09B01) (L.L.). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, interpretation, writing of the report or the decision to submit the article for publication.
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J.L. and L.L. conceived and designed the study and contributed to the interpretation of the results and critical revision of the paper for valuable intellectual content. L.L., Z.C. and J.C., as the members of the CKB steering committee, designed and supervised the conduct of the whole study, obtained funding and together with C.Y., Y.G., P.P., L.Y., Y.C., H.D., S.B., S.S. and F.N. acquired the CKB data. Q.S. and Y.H. accessed, verified and analysed the data. Q.S. drafted the paper. All authors had access to the data and have read and approved the final paper. The corresponding author attests that all listed authors meet authorship criteria and that no others meeting the criteria have been omitted. J.L. and L.L. are the guarantors.
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Supplementary Text (including a list of CKB members and their affiliations), Methods, Tables 1–4 and Figs. 1–12.
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The China Kadoorie Biobank Collaborative Group. Healthy lifestyle and life expectancy free of major chronic diseases at age 40 in China. Nat Hum Behav (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01624-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01624-7