We were recently at Europrevent 2019* presenting the results of our Life Age trial with Imperial College London which showed that people who took the Life Age test in conjunction with our Younger Lives program improved both their physical health and their mental wellbeing (health and happiness). www.youngerlives.com
Alongside us were many colleagues from across the globe, including Imperial College presenting results from the latest ‘Euroaspire’ survey of heart disease and the ‘Euroaction’ trials of lifestyle risk reduction – and we were all struck just how much the world’s physical and mental health could be improved if there were more of a concerted effort to engage people with lifestyle change. For example, when lifestyle change programmes were run for patients along with their partners, smoking cessation rates improved by 5 times!
That’s because many of the changes we need people to make are not just about improving physical health but also strengthening emotional wellbeing and resilience. Health and happiness are a powerful combination – it’s easier to feel happy when you are healthy, and easier to stay health when you are happy. This is not just intuitive, but also backed up by science, and we’ve seen striking correlations between life satisfaction and health factors in our own data.
Our Life Age programme helps improve lifestyle factors that are proven to both affect premature mortality from any causes (weight, nutrition, activity, smoking and alcohol) as well as those that improve emotional wellbeing (sleep, mood, stress and life satisfaction).
As our trial showed; simple, understandable and motivating messages about personal health risks can stimulate both lifestyle (behaviour) change and risk factor reduction. That’s why we remain as an organisation totally committed in efforts to design better patient communication tools in Singapore, Europe, the UK, Australia and the US, and believe that our Life Age programme represents a modern way of fusing health and happiness factors into something that truly motivates change.
*Europrevent is the prevention-focused conference of the European Society of Cardiology with about 1200 committed delegates from a wide variety of countries attending.
Comentarios