Cardiovascular, respiratory, and musculoskeletal disease are among the leading causes of disability in middle-aged and older people. Health and lifestyle factors in youth have known associations with cardiovascular or respiratory disease in adulthood, but largely unknown associations with musculoskeletal disease. We included approximately 40, year-old Swedish males, who completed their conscription examination in to , followed up until age of 60 years.
Exposures of interest were physical health: body mass and height, blood pressure, pulse at rest, muscle strength, cardiorespiratory fitness, and hematocrit; self-reported lifestyle: smoking, alcohol, and drug use; self-reported health: overall, headache and gastrointestinal.
We followed the participants through the Swedish National Patient Register for incidence of common musculoskeletal osteoarthritis, back pain, shoulder lesions, joint pain, myalgia , cardiovascular ischemic heart disease, atrial fibrillation , and respiratory diseases asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, bronchitis. We analyzed the associations using general estimating equations Poisson regression with all exposures included in one model and adjusted for parental education and occupation.
We found that higher body mass was associated with higher risk of musculoskeletal risk ratio [RR] per 1 standard deviation [SD] 1. Notably, higher muscle strength and cardiorespiratory fitness were associated with higher risk of musculoskeletal disease RRs 1. No large consistent associations were found for other exposures.
The most notable associations with specific musculoskeletal conditions were for cardiorespiratory fitness and osteoarthritis RR 1. The main limitations include lack of adjustment for genetic factors and environmental exposures from childhood, and that the register data were available for males only. While high body mass was a risk factor for all 3 studied groups of diseases, high cardiorespiratory fitness and high muscle strength in youth were associated with increased risk of musculoskeletal disease in middle age.
