– and want to live to 100. Will my years of drinking and inactivity be a problem?

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Can a late convert to wellbeing undo decades of beer and barbecues? In the first of a new series, Phil Daoust has a health MOT – and gets some worrying news about his heart

am sitting in a consulting room, talking through the results of an unusually thorough health check. The doctor seems happy with most of them, but he lingers on the squiggly lines of my ECG – a chart of the electrical signals in my heart. He’s found something called a “prolonged PR interval”. I’m very happily married to a PR, so this sounds quite pleasant, but then he explains that P and R are points on the squiggly lines, and that I probably have “first-degree heart block”.

We didn’t have the consolation of believing that she was happy in her final years. She was never one to complain but from the outside it wasn’t much of an existence: frail, confused, pretty much housebound. In the winter of 2022-23, I spent months almost immobilised after spending far too long working on a laptop. What began with aand tingling in one arm turned into wave after wave of agony that kept me off work and sent me to A&E. It took me weeks to get the painkillers I needed, and while the exercises the physio gave me made a difference, progress was slow. I finally turned the corner with a shockingly intense massage.

For a sanity check on the likelihood of making it into triple digits, I ask an actuary. Every time you take out life insurance or a pension, an actuary will have calculated how long you – well, someone like you, from a similar area, of a similar age, background and so on – are likely to live. This is an industry where accuracy counts and, as, the head of longevity and demographic insights at Lane Clark & Peacock, points out, you can’t simply use the most widely quoted figures of 78.

 

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