Exercise for Three More Years of Life

People who exercise can add three years to their lives, and their hearts reap benefits from something as simple as brisk walking a half-hour a day, two studies suggest.

Three years of extra life: It's a very clear message that makes it easy to grasp what might be the consequences of a sedentary lifestyle, said Dr. Oscar Franco, coauthor of one of the studies and a researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

In the Rotterdam study, researchers analyzed more than four decades of data from the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running health analysis of suburban Boston, Mass., residents.

The researchers grouped 4,121 people into three levels of physical activity: low, medium and high. The volunteers, who had kept track of how long they spent doing various activities each day, received scores based on the estimated oxygen consumed for their activities.

Life expectancy at age 50 for the medium activity group was 1.5 years longer than for the low activity group. The high activity group lived 3.5 years longer.