Doctor Toby Ford for Queensland Farmer Today | November, 2021
Welcome back to our conversation about health in the bush. If you followed the thread of my comments last time, I pointed out that health in the bush lags the city and that the more remote you live, the shorter your lifespan. Well, I hope this spurred you to think you would swim against this trend and beat the odds.
If we could pick our parents then, one might know that there are some of us with genetic disposition from our parents for such valuable things as low cholesterol, low body weight, limited risk for skin cancer, lower propensity for baldness. These are all things that travel on our genetic coding from our parents.
Some of you will have relatives who have lived to 100 and smoked, drank, stayed up late, backed slow racehorses, all the things we say are bad for you and yet they kicked a goal and lived well to a 100. But for every one of those relatives, we can find many more others who have done the wrong things I mentioned and gone down early.
So I am keen on disease prevention, health screening and adoption of wellbeing strategies to improve quality and quantity of life. But ironically before you can prevent something happening, first you’ve got to know what caused it.
One of the best studies of all time in heart disease occurred in Framingham, Massachusetts’s, USA in 1948, a little over 75 years ago. It was a country town about the size of Roma or Biloela in western Queensland.
It was a mixed population of farming and light industry. They invited about 5000 men and women aged 30 to 65 years of age who had never had a heart attack to step forward to longitudinally monitor them over a number of years to work out if there were common risk factors that led people to having heart attacks (cardiovascular events) .
After following three generations of people there is now good evidence to suggest that there are 4 irreversible risk factors – age, gender (men on average have heart disease 10 years earlier than women, family history and race ( some first nation people have a higher risk ). These factors are locked in and one might say well why worry, but guess what the weighting on the risks is pretty equal for the other five that you can do something about.
Those people who smoked, had diabetes, high blood pressure, were inactive and obese were heavily represented in the group who developed heart disease as they aged.
So what you might say. Well, there are a group of us who will do something about these reversible risk factors, then a group who would might if there was an incentive and then there is the group who are just plan lazy or couldn’t care less.
I’m not sure which one you might be in, but if you were thinking of doing something or you are already doing something then well done. What I’d like you to do is to look around and see if you can invite someone who might be close to you to share the same practice as you. This person might be your relative or a mate.
One of my best stories is about five 50 year old blokes in a country town who bet each other they couldn’t walk around the footy oval they played rugby league on in their teens . I said to one of them don’t just do it for yourself , get your old fat mates and drag them out and he did just that. So five days a week they get up at sparrows and they walk around their old oval 10 times then they go and have a cup of tea and yarn. As my client says they call themselves the WGAF group . I will leave you to work out this but that is the start of something simple but great because one of those blokes because of the exercise is still alive today and he has lost weight , stopped smoking and switched off his diabetes . Not bad eh if you think about it. It can start simply by you getting a group together , bet them something and see what happens. And another ting its good for mental health and don’t we need this addressed in todays bush.
