The healthy habits that protect your heart and combat chronic disease also seem to be good for your eyes. New research on a subset of the Womens Health Initiative (WHI) reports that women who eat right, exercise and dont smoke were 71% less likely to develop age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of blindness among older Americans.
Researchers Julie A. Mares, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin, and colleagues con- cluded in Archives of Ophthalmology, Adopting these healthy habits may markedly lower the prevalence of early AMD, the number of people who develop advanced AMD in their lifetime, and healthcare costs associated with treatment for this condition.
Although an observational study not designed to prove cause-and-effect, the research was able to take advantage of a nearly ideal sample for probing links between lifestyle and AMD: The 1,313 par-ticipants in the Carotenoids in Age-Related Eye Disease Study (CAREDS) were recruited from among women who had provided detailed dietary and lifestyle data some six years earlier for the large WHI project. Us- ing stereoscopic fundus photography, Mares and colleagues identifed 202 women with signs of AMD, all but 12 in the early stages of the disease.
They compared this presence of AMD with what the women had reported six years before about their diet, exercise and smoking habits. For this analysis, participants were divided into fve groups (quintiles) based on the healthfulness of their diets-getting points for eating whole grains, vegetables, fruit and low-fat milk, with points off for saturated fats, sodium and added sugar. The one-ffth of women with the healthiest diets were at 46% lower risk of AMD.
Exercise and other physical activity were scored by estimated total energy expenditures per week. The most-active women were 54% less likely to develop AMD.
Smoking was not a very strong indepen- dent risk factor in the CAREDS results, but became important when combined with diet and exercise. Women in the top one-ffth of a combined healthy living index were at 71% lower risk, and even those in the next two quintiles were signifcantly less likely to develop the degenerative eye disease (47% and 38% reduced risk, respectively).
Mares and colleagues speculated that a healthy lifestyle could help prevent AMD by reducing blood pressure, infammation and oxidative stress. Healthy habits could also affect the pigment in the macula of the eye, making the macula less vulnerable to oxidative damage. Archives of Ophthalmology, <dx.doi. org/10.1001/archophthalmol.2010.314>