Farmers’ Lifestyle Wiser Than We Thought

“We need to be concerned about hip fractures, as they are the most serious and disabling osteoporosis-related fractures,” said Dr. Helena Johansson.

Dr. Johansson is with the Centre for Metabolic Bone Diseases at the University of Sheffield Medical School in the United Kingdom. She and her team of British and Swedish researchers have just released the results of a study on hip fracture risk, focused on farmers in Sweden — with some key lessons for us all.

Fractures happen more easily as we age and hip fractures happen to be among the most common injuries sustained. In the U.S., 250,000 to 500,000 women break a hip or spinal bone every year — 90 percent of the time from a fall, reports the Health in Aging website.

On top of the debilitating nature of the injury itself, our risk of dying goes up by 20 percent in the year after a hip fracture. Of those who survive, only about half of all patients return to their previous level of activity.

It’s why the study results are so intriguing.

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Sweden is one of the few countries that tracks hip fractures through a national registry. The records make it possible to assess hip fracture risk across the country by occupation, economic status, level of education, location, and urban versus rural residence.

The researchers focused on farming, an occupation characterized by long-term and regular outdoor physical activity — a characteristic worth noting. Looking at the hip fracture incidence of all men and women aged 40 years or more in Sweden between 1987 and 2002, researchers found there were 100,083 individuals who sustained a hip fracture.

Of these, 4,175 were farmers.

Among men and women, hip fracture risk rose with age, low income, low education, higher latitude, and urban location.

Male farmers saw a 14 percent decreased risk of hip fracture compared to other occupations, adjusted for age. When adjusted for income, education, and latitude, the effect was even more marked, with a 39 percent lower risk. Women farmers saw no distinct advantage.

“Given the many complex factors that affect fracture risk, it is not possible to pinpoint a single variable that is associated with lower hip fracture risk,” Dr. Johansson said in a release.

“However, these findings are interesting in that they suggest that a lifetime of outdoor, physical activity may be a positive factor when it comes to hip fracture risk.”