The total environments to which individuals have been exposed throughout the lifestages from birth to the present time have been composing the individual and community lifestyles. Such lifestyles are known to determine the risks for developments of cancers, circulatory diseases, and other chronic diseases.
To establish new theory and practice programs for disease prevention and health promotion in the environmental and preventive medicine, we have quantitatively investigated correlations of lifestyles, or ways of daily living, to comprehensive health potentials in the cohort of industrial workers. The total lifestyles were evaluated by the originally-designed 8 health-practices such as smoking, alcohol-drinking, physical exercise, and working and sleeping patterns. The data indicate that individuals having good lifestyles showed much younger health ages calculated based on the health-check-up data, and lower risks for developing lifestyle-related diseases than those with poor lifestyles.
The physical health potentials were assessed by the biomarker-measurements such as lymphocyte chromosome-DNA alterations, natural-killer activities and serum IgE levels. The psycho-mental health potentials were evaluated by both the quality-of-life-related questionnaires and the stress-related hormonal and cytokine levels such as cortisol and interleukines. The comprehensive health potentials have been shown to be significantly lower in poor-lifestyle people than in good-lifestyle ones. The changes in poor to good lifestyles through health education and learning were also shown to result in promotion of such health potentials.
