Chances of living to 90 vary between different sexes and body sizes.

Living to at least 90 years can depend on your body size — height and weight — as well as your level of physical activity, and seems to influence a woman’s life expectancy more than a man’s. The findings are from a study published in the British journal Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.

The research found that women who lived into their 90s were, on average, taller and gained less weight since their 20s, compared to women who were shorter and heavier. The same association was not observed for men. However, men had more benefits from physical activity than women.

While the study is observational and cannot establish causation, the results “provide interesting hints that men’s and women’s health may respond differently to BMI, height and exercise,” said epidemiologist David Carslake, a senior research associate at the University. from Bristol, UK, who did not participate in the study.

BMI, which stands for Body Mass Index, is a measure of body fat based on height and weight calculations.

A decades-long study

In 1986, researchers asked more than 7,000 men and women in the Netherlands between the ages of 55 and 69 about their height, current weight and how much they weighed at age 20. Both sexes also told researchers about their physical activity, which included dog walking, gardening, home improvements, walking or cycling to work, and sports.

Men and women were then classified into daily activity quotas: less than 30 minutes, 30 to 60 minutes, and 90 minutes or more.

The groups were followed until they died or reached the age of 90 years; of the 7,807 participants, 433 men and 994 women lived to this age. Issues that could affect longevity, such as smoking and level of alcohol use, were also taken into account.

Men and women in the study had very different results when it came to the impact of body size and exercise.

Women who weighed less in their 20s and gained less weight as they aged were more likely to live longer than heavier women. Height played a big factor: the study found that women over 1.50m tall were 31% more likely to live to age 90 than women under 1.70m.

However, neither height nor weight seemed to influence whether men reached the age of 90, but the level of physical activity did.

Men who spent 90 minutes a day or more being active were 39% more likely to live to 90 than men who were physically active for less than 30 minutes. Also, for every 30 minutes a day men were active, they were 5% more likely to reach that age.

Women who were physically active for more than 60 minutes a day were only 21% more likely to live to 90 than those who did 30 minutes or less. In fact, the study found that the ideal level of activity for women was 60 minutes a day.

Decreased life expectancy

Average life expectancy has been increasing in most parts of the world, but recent studies show a slowdown in this trend in some developed countries.

In the United States, for example, life expectancy has been decreasing in recent years. Drug overdoses and suicides are to blame for the latest decline, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but the leading causes of death remain the same.

Weight gain and lack of exercise affect all three of the leading causes of death for Americans: heart disease, cancer and stroke.

“It is now very clear that overweight, obesity and sedentary lifestyles are harmful to health,” said Carslake. “Studies like this one, which examine the shape of associations and ask whether they are the same in different groups, will be increasingly important,” concluded the British researcher.