Better than any pill - and no side effects! Healthy lifestyles, statins and aspirin

Elwood, Peter C, Longley, Marcus, Greene, Giles ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9326-8740, Morgan, Gareth, Watkins, John ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1212-513X, Pickering, Janet, Watkins, Angela ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1212-513X, Protty, Majd, Bayer, Antony ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7514-248X and Gallacher, John 2020. Better than any pill - and no side effects! Healthy lifestyles, statins and aspirin. Lifestyle Medecine 1 (1) , e4. 10.1002/lim2.4

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Abstract

Behaviors which are associated with the preservation of health include nonsmoking, regular exercise, a low body weight, a healthy diet, and a low alcohol intake. Together, as a healthy lifestyle, these have been shown to be associated with marked protection against a wide range of diseases: diabetes, vascular disease, cancer, and dementia. On the other hand, the protection associated with statins and aspirin, the two most commonly used preventive drugs, is limited to vascular disease and, probably for aspirin, cancer. These are not alternative prophylactics and any two, or all three—a healthy lifestyle, a statin, and aspirin—can reasonably be taken together. Only a small proportion of the members of the community follow a healthy lifestyle. Yet a small increase in the uptake of the healthy behaviors throughout the community can be shown to have relatively large effects on the incidence of disease. There is therefore an urgent need for health promotion activities across the whole community to be greatly increased and for new challenging and encouraging strategies to be devised and tested.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Medicine
Additional Information:	This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	2688-3740
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	26 August 2020
Date of Acceptance:	19 August 2020
Last Modified:	13 May 2023 20:05
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/134356

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