Picture two 42-year-old men in a doctor’s office in Helsinki in 1970. Same suit, same job, same country. One walks out with five good numbers on his chart. The other walks out with five bad ones.
Now fast-forward half a century. The first man had a 42% chance of blowing out 90 candles. The second had a 7% chance.
That’s the finding of a recent study published by researchers at the University of Helsinki in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. It followed about 2,700 Finnish men from their early 40s until, for nearly all of them, the end of their lives.
I’ve been writing about money for 35 years, and I’ll tell you what I tell everyone planning for retirement: The biggest variable isn’t your portfolio. It’s whether you’re alive and able to enjoy it. This study puts hard odds on that.
What the researchers actually measured
The study is called the Helsinki Businessmen Study, and it’s one of the longest-running health cohorts anywhere. Between 1964 and 1973, 2,690 men with an average age of 42 got a battery of tests. Then the researchers kept tabs on them for more than 50 years.
Five numbers from those original exams did the heavy lifting: smoking status, body mass index, systolic blood pressure, total cholesterol and blood sugar after a glucose drink. A man was low risk on a factor if he cleared its threshold, so scores ran from zero to five.
Among men who cleared none of the five, 6.8% reached 90. Among men who cleared all five, 41.9% did. Six times the odds, from five readings taken before most of them had gray hair.
But living longer isn’t the headline for me. Living better is. When the survivors were surveyed in 2007, at an average age of 79, 24.5% of the zero-factor men were frail. In the five-factor group, it was 2.2%.
Frail means the wheelchair, the walker, the aide who comes three times a week. It’s the difference between a retirement you planned and one that gets planned for you.
The men who’d been low-risk at 42 also reported more happiness and more psychological well-being in their late 70s. Study author Timo Strandberg, professor emeritus at the University of Helsinki, said the results show a healthy lifestyle “can add both years and functional capacity to your life.”
One caveat: This is a study of Finnish men, mostly white-collar, born in the 1920s. Not a single woman. The biology likely rhymes for the rest of us, but the exact percentages are theirs, not yours.
Here’s what those five thresholds were, in numbers you can compare to your own chart.
Smoking
The first factor is the simplest: You either smoked or you didn’t. No amount was low enough to count as low risk.
This one won’t surprise anybody. Plenty of men in this study smoked, and they lost ground on every measure that followed. If you still smoke, quitting is the only item on this list that can flip from a fail to a pass by Friday.
Body mass index
The cutoff was a BMI under 25, which is the top of the normal range. For a 5-foot-10 man, that’s about 174 pounds. For a 5-foot-5 woman, it’s roughly 150.
BMI is a blunt instrument. It doesn’t know muscle from fat, and plenty of researchers criticize it. But in this study it was measured once, at 42, and it still predicted who’d be walking unassisted at 79. That tells you a midlife waistline isn’t a cosmetic issue.
Blood pressure
The line was a systolic reading, the top number, under 140. That’s the old definition of high blood pressure. Current U.S. guidelines are stricter, calling 130 to 139 stage 1 hypertension.
I mention that because a lot of people in their 40s and 50s have a top number of 135 and think they’re fine. By the 1970 standard, they were. By today’s, they’re not. Either way, a free cuff at the pharmacy tells you where you stand.
A quick nudge — when it comes to money, the best day to get smart was 20 years ago. The second-best is today. Sign up for the free Money Talks Newsletter and start now. Takes 10 seconds, costs nothing, and could change your retirement.
Cholesterol
The threshold was total cholesterol under 6.0 millimoles per liter, which works out to about 232 milligrams per deciliter in the units your U.S. lab report uses.
That’s a generous line. American guidelines call anything 200 and above “borderline high.” So the men who made the cut here weren’t paragons. They were just under a fairly loose ceiling — and the payoff was still enormous when stacked with the other four.
Blood sugar
The fifth factor was glucose one hour after a sugary test drink, with the bar set at under 9.0 millimoles per liter, or about 162 milligrams per deciliter. That’s a post-meal-style reading, not the fasting number most of us see.
The point isn’t the exact test. It’s that blood sugar drifting upward in your 40s, long before anyone says the word diabetes, showed up decades later as frailty and shorter life. If you’ve had an A1C reading that your doctor called “prediabetic,” this is the factor talking to you.
Why a money guy cares about this
Every retirement calculator I’ve ever seen asks how long you expect to live. Most people guess. This study says your 42-year-old self already answered the question, at least in rough odds.
That has real financial consequences. A man who reaches 90 needs his savings to last 25 years past a typical retirement age, not 15. There’s a longevity target most Americans don’t budget for, and this research is one more reason to plan for the long tail.
But the frailty number cuts the other way. The men who cleared all five factors weren’t just around longer. They needed less help. Long-term care is the single expense most likely to wreck a retirement plan, and the five-factor men were 11 times less likely to be frail at 79.
There’s a pattern forming across recent research, too. A study Money Talks News covered found that managing blood pressure, blood sugar and smoking in midlife added about 13 dementia-free years. Same factors, different outcome, same lesson: The 40s are when the ledger gets written.
What to do with this
If you’re 42, or anywhere near it, get all five numbers this year. Every one of them costs little or nothing to measure, and every one of them can be moved.
If you’re 62 or 72, don’t assume the window is shut. This study measured men once, at 42, because that’s when the study started. It doesn’t say improving at 60 is useless. Plenty of other research says the opposite.
And if you’re the one doing the retirement planning for a household, add these five readings to the spreadsheet next to the account balances. They may tell you more about how your retirement will go than anything your broker sends you.
You can’t control everything. But the Helsinki men who cleared these five bars didn’t have better luck. They had better numbers — and 50 years later, the difference was 42% versus 7%.
Add a Comment