3 ms·

Age has quite a bit to do with it. You rarely see acute myocardial infarction in 15 year olds, and you often see it in 80 year olds. There is a continuum of ris

Age has quite a bit to do with it. You rarely see acute myocardial infarction in 15 year olds, and you often see it in 80 year olds. There is a continuum of risk, and age plays a role. Because there are risk factors that are uncorrelated or imperfectly correlated with physical fitness and its outward manifestations, even physically fit individuals cannot escape this.

whalesalad 9y ago
For those reading, acute myocardial infarction is the scientific word for heart attack. Not sure why that needed to be used in this context. Second... if take a 15 year old who is out of shape and an 80 year old who is out of shape and have them shovel equal length driveways ... sure my money is on the 15 year old. But... you can't say that this problem is due to people being older. 30 year old folks can still have heart attacks shoveling snow. There are loads of folks out there who are in their 40s and 50s who won't experience any medical issues with the exertion required to shovel a driveway. So the point I was trying to illustrate is that it's not fair to blame age. Age is one variable in a very complex equation that influences your level of fitness.
- linkregister 9y ago
  Earlier comment: > Age has absolutely nothing to do with it. This comment: > Age is one variable in a very complex equation that influences your level of fitness. I appreciate your conceding that age is a major factor in health.
  - joe_the_user 9y ago
    Well, one thing to consider is that age inevitable. Age is a factor in heart attacks but it's also simply a factor in dying from whatever cause. A statement like "age has nothing to do with whether you die prematurely from a heart attack in particular - fitness is the main factor" might be true even if age is a big factor in whether one dies of a heart attack at a given moment ... because it is a big factor in whether you are going at a given moment. Wake up older and you're more likely to die overall. Be unfit physically and engage in very vigorous exercise and a heart becomes n% more likely to be the way you die. Those might or might be deemed to two separate facts - ie "die prematurely of a heart attack" is itself pretty ambiguous, ha ha. Do statistics correctly is hard and describing statistical situations with everyday language is a hard problem on top of this original challenge.
  - bonesss 9y ago
    > ...age is a major factor in health Tangential, but: I read a fascinating book about ageing and death from a doctor who worked with such things. My big takeway, from a systems perspective, was that we generally don't die because of a single component-level failure but rather as a collective systematic overloads that push failure throughout the body until a component dies (and so do we). Age makes our lungs, arteries, heart, organs, and the rest of it work sub optimally. Poorer lung function forces our hearts to work harder. Poor heart function causes our lungs to work harder. An unusual shock like shovelling pushes all components, which push each other, which is a great way to trigger failure modes. This looks a lot like what we see in complex systems over time. Age is biological-debt :)
- booleandilemma 9y ago
  Parent is a cardiology fellow. They probably used that term for the same reason a programmer would say “binary” instead of “ones and zeroes”.

whalesalad 9y ago

For those reading, acute myocardial infarction is the scientific word for heart attack. Not sure why that needed to be used in this context. Second... if take a 15 year old who is out of shape and an 80 year old who is out of shape and have them shovel equal length driveways ... sure my money is on the 15 year old. But... you can't say that this problem is due to people being older. 30 year old folks can still have heart attacks shoveling snow. There are loads of folks out there who are in their 40s and 50s who won't experience any medical issues with the exertion required to shovel a driveway. So the point I was trying to illustrate is that it's not fair to blame age. Age is one variable in a very complex equation that influences your level of fitness.

linkregister 9y ago
Earlier comment: > Age has absolutely nothing to do with it. This comment: > Age is one variable in a very complex equation that influences your level of fitness. I appreciate your conceding that age is a major factor in health.
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  Well, one thing to consider is that age inevitable. Age is a factor in heart attacks but it's also simply a factor in dying from whatever cause. A statement like "age has nothing to do with whether you die prematurely from a heart attack in particular - fitness is the main factor" might be true even if age is a big factor in whether one dies of a heart attack at a given moment ... because it is a big factor in whether you are going at a given moment. Wake up older and you're more likely to die overall. Be unfit physically and engage in very vigorous exercise and a heart becomes n% more likely to be the way you die. Those might or might be deemed to two separate facts - ie "die prematurely of a heart attack" is itself pretty ambiguous, ha ha. Do statistics correctly is hard and describing statistical situations with everyday language is a hard problem on top of this original challenge.
- bonesss 9y ago
  > ...age is a major factor in health Tangential, but: I read a fascinating book about ageing and death from a doctor who worked with such things. My big takeway, from a systems perspective, was that we generally don't die because of a single component-level failure but rather as a collective systematic overloads that push failure throughout the body until a component dies (and so do we). Age makes our lungs, arteries, heart, organs, and the rest of it work sub optimally. Poorer lung function forces our hearts to work harder. Poor heart function causes our lungs to work harder. An unusual shock like shovelling pushes all components, which push each other, which is a great way to trigger failure modes. This looks a lot like what we see in complex systems over time. Age is biological-debt :)
booleandilemma 9y ago
Parent is a cardiology fellow. They probably used that term for the same reason a programmer would say “binary” instead of “ones and zeroes”.