By William J. Cromie

Gazette Staff

The Class of 1997 can get a good idea of how healthy they'll be as elders by checking out alums from the Classes of 1920 through 1954. Two long-running studies show that these Harvard graduates are healthier and longer-lived than the general population.

The Grant Study, begun in 1937, tracks the physical and mental health of graduates from the Classes of 1939 through 1944. It is one of the longest-running, if not the longest, study of people who stay well.

"About 60 percent of the 268 graduates in this study will live past 80 years and still be active and involved with life," says study director George Vaillant '55, professor of psychiatry at Brigham and Women's Hospital. "This unheard of collective vitality offers a window into the future. Grant Study men represent a longevity that industrialized nations (with luck) will achieve between 2050 and 2075."

The School of Public Health, in 1962, began its College Alumni Health Study to track 36,500 alumni of the Classes of 1920 through 1954. The continuing effort examines how personal characteristics and lifestyles relate to development of chronic diseases.

"This study and others have found that the number of years of education is strongly correlated with increasing good health," notes I-Min Lee, assistant professor of epidemiology. "Harvard alums exemplify this fact. They smoke less, weigh less, and exercise more."

The Class of 1942 is a case in point. In 1992, only 4 percent of the men smoked; 57 percent had smoked but quit. The rest never smoked. Almost half (43 percent) of the 668 alums still alive at the time expended 2,500 calories a week in exercising (equivalent to walking 25 or more miles a week). One-third worked off 1,000 to 2,500 calories, and the rest expended 1,000 calories or less. The most popular activities, in order, were walking, swimming, gardening, and tennis.

Both studies were done with men, but other researchers have reached many of the same conclusions about women and the relationship of their lifestyles to chronic diseases, says Lee.

Work and Play

One hundred ninety (71 percent) of the 268 Grant Study men are alive at age 77. Sixty-seven (25 percent) of them still worked full time when they were 70.

"At age 75 plus, only 11 alums still worked full time, but 40 percent are still as active as much younger men," Vaillant says. "At 70, half of the participants still engaged in vigorous sports and yard work and experienced few physical limitations from aging. We don't have complete data for age 75, but, as is inevitable, splitting wood and downhill skiing have become less common. The only bad news is that their collective longevity makes prostate cancer a far bigger problem than [it was] for their fathers.

"We continue to document that long-lived Grant Study men are not like the 80-year-old alumnus who wrote to the Yale Alumni Bulletin that he found himself sitting in the middle of the stairs pondering if he had been upstairs and going down, or downstairs and going up. But then," Vaillant joked, "Yalies probably had the same problem at 50."

Weight and Health

Vaillant compared Grant Study participants with 456 inner-city men of the same age group who had lower IQs and less education. "Many of the latter became 50 to 100 pounds overweight, but you have to look hard among the alums to find someone who is 20 pounds overweight," he says.

The bottom line of life is that the Harvard graduates died at half the rate of the urban men.

As you would expect, the School of Public Health's alumni study found that obesity was a key predictor of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. "Although common knowledge now, such findings first surfaced in the 1960s and 1970s when knowledge of the effects of lifestyle on health were scant," notes Ralph Paffenbarger, visiting professor of epidemiology.

Likelihood of heart disease during middle age was decreased by participation in intramural and varsity sports, at least up through age 50. This protective effect disappeared in the fifth decade of life, however, unless the men kept up a moderate level of physical activity.

"Sedentary college students who later took up an active and fit way of life were at lower heart-attack risk than former varsity players who gave up or reduced physical activity in middle age," says I-Min Lee. "Men who expend 1,000 calories a week cut their risk of colon cancer in half. Walking a half-hour a day for at least five days a week burns the required calories. Different studies show that women also protect themselves from heart disease and colon cancer by moderate exercise."

Physical activity in middle age also cuts the risk of developing diabetes. For each 500 calories of energy expended per week, diabetes risk drops 6 percent, according to the School of Public Health (SPH) study.

On the mental side, the death of parents before college, smoking, abusing alcohol, insomnia, worrying, self-consciousness, and mood swings characterized those most likely to commit suicide. Denial of worries, self-consciousness, early parental loss, tobacco and alcohol use also foreshadowed accidental death. Depression occurred more frequently among smokers and those who reported insomnia, exhaustion, rapid mood swings, and self-consciousness. It occurred less frequently among alums who played sports and were physically active.

The SPH study calculates that men can gain a year and a half of extra life between ages 45 and 84 by being physically active. Quitting smoking buys almost 2 extra years. Keeping blood pressure normal adds a year. Becoming active and quitting smoking adds 3 to 4 years.

Vaillant does not put as much emphasis on exercise. "All the months of life you gain by jogging regularly, you waste by jogging regularly," he says.

"Good health at age 70 was most powerfully predicted by stopping smoking, not abusing alcohol, never taking tranquilizers, and having lots of friends," Vaillant continues. "Obesity, exercise, cholesterol, and other social supports seem less important."

For the Class of 1997 and other recent graduates, he offers this advice: "Styles of adapting to stress prior to one's 25th reunion continue to be the most important predictor of psychosocial well-being at age 75." Favorable styles cited by Vaillant include creativity, humor, altruism, and stoicism. Unfavorable are tension, paranoia, anxiety, fantasy, blaming others for your failures, and putting things off until tomorrow (the Scarlett O'Hara defense).

Personalities and Politics

Vaillant and his colleagues found an unsuspected link between personality and politics. Grant Study psychiatrists assigned dominant personality traits to each student during his college days. "These traits, to everyone's surprise, predicted who would be Republicans and who would be Democrats 50 years later," Vaillant says.

"The vast majority (74 percent) of staunch Democrats were assigned one or more of the following traits: 'sensitive,' 'ideational (egghead-like),' 'cultural,' 'introspective,' or 'creative and intuitive.' Most of the staunch Republicans struck the psychiatrists as 'pragmatic' and 'organized.' In short, Harvard Democrats are more creative, while Republicans are more sensible."

Vaillant wrote to the Grant men in February, "Your political beliefs are not associated with your intelligence, humanism, mental health, happiness, or childhood prosperity. But personality traits evident in college seem more important in controlling your vote than anything you probably read in [the newspapers] in the last 50 years."