Ageing With Attitude: Exercise can help fight debilitating illnesses

Margaret Jennings discovers that the more you exercise, the more your body has the capacity to fight off debilitating illnesses — in spite of inherited disease

WERE exercising, eating well and leading a more stress-free life among your new year resolutions? If your enthusiasm is flagging then keep this in mind: those positive lifestyle changes may have more influence on how you age and your longevity, than the genetic blueprint you inherited from your family tree.

While it can be easy to blame our health problems on our ancestors, buying into the belief that we will inevitably have certain diseases or will die young — genes only explain about 25 percent of the variation in our lifespan, according to James McInerney, former director of the Genetics and Bioinformatics degree course at NUI Maynooth and now chair in Evolutionary Biology at The University of Manchester.