Healthy Women, Healthy Lives: A Guide to Preventing Disease, from the Landmark Nurses' Health Study [Hardcover]

Susan E. Sc.D. Hankinson (Editor), Graham A. M.D. Colditz (Editor), JoAnn E. M.D. Manson (Editor), Frank E. M.D. Speizer (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 10, 2001

In 1976, a team of physicians and researchers at Harvard Medical School heard from more than 120,000 women in response to a two-page questionnaire. Twenty-five years later, the Nurses' Health Study is still going strong. One of the largest, longest running, and most comprehensive health studies ever conducted, it has helped answer many key questions about the long-term health of American women. It is a remarkable story of dedicated researchers and study participants -- nurses who meticulously documented their everyday activities; filled out long, detailed forms; and even provided blood and tissue samples when asked...solely for the sake of advancing the health of women.

Individual results of this study are familiar to everyone. The Nurses' Health Study was among the first to show that using postmenopausal hormones increases the risk of breast cancer but that eating a high fat diet does not; that gaining weight in adulthood raises the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and some cancers but that doing simple exercises like walking can lower those risks. There's more. The Nurses' Health Study has also helped answer these important questions: Which vitamins really protect against cancer? How does the type of fat in food contribute to heart disease and cancer? What are the risks and benefits of postmenopausal hormones and birth control pills? And how big are the benefits of quitting smoking?

For twenty-five years, the Nurses' Health Study has followed more than 120,000 real women, leading real lives, to find what works -- and what doesn't -- to improve the health of women. Its findings over the years have resulted in hundreds of professional papers and newspaper headlines. Now, forthe first time, the most important findings from this study have been gathered together, summarized along with the results of other major research studies, and made accessible to the general public in book form.

But "Healthy Women, Healthy Lives" goes beyond simply labeling preventive factors and risky behavior -- it provides practical tips and strategies for making healthy lifestyle changes from clinical experts at Harvard Medical School. Here are the best ways to lower your risk of chronic disease as well as tips for losing weight, stopping smoking, eating healthily, and exercising regularly.

No matter how many other health books you own, "Healthy Women, Healthy Lives" is a unique addition. With easy-to-read graphics that clarify complex information at a glance, easy-to-follow strategies and personal tips from Harvard physicians, and personal stories from nurses who have contributed to the study, it is a valuable book created for all women.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

We knew it all along, but now here's proof--women are different! Healthy Women, Healthy Lives is the first book to be based on the now-famous 30-year study of thousands of nurses. Researchers from Harvard Medical School have assembled a straightforward medical guide focusing on the major preventable diseases that women are susceptible to, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and osteoporosis. The advice here is not particularly earthshattering. Eating grains and vegetables will make us healthier, as will exercising, maintaining a healthy weight, and not smoking. It's the level of practical detail in each chapter on disease that stands out; after reading this, you'll have a full understanding of how to balance your behaviors and unpreventable risks to achieve optimum health. Best of all, every detail is woman-specific, from healthy weights to average age of first heart attack.

After providing ways for reading statistical charts and background on the study, the book is divided into two parts. The first 10 chapters are devoted to individual diseases, your possible risks, and ways to reduce those risks. Each chapter ends with a no-nonsense article written by a doctor, based on the study, that summarizes the advice that doctor gives to his or her own patients. The last chapters offer advice on changing behaviors. Here, you'll find suggestions on improving activity levels and diet modification, as well as the risks and benefits of aspirin, alcohol, and vitamins.

If you're tired of the daily news reports with their conflicting evidence and suggestions, treat yourself to a book that delivers practical information, useful statistics, and advice that actually makes sense. --Jill Lightner

From Publishers Weekly

Harvard Medical School has conducted a landmark 25-year study of women's health. The Nurses' Health Study closely examined the habits of over 225,000 women, yielding insight into heart disease, breast and ovarian cancer, diabetes and other serious illnesses and making it the largest study to date on the effects of behavior and lifestyle on women's health. This reference guide summarizes the study's results. Not surprisingly, given its source's broad scope, the book contains an enormous amount of material. Its brief first section explains the guidelines for the study and defines important terms such as "risk." The second section probably the one with the broadest appeal deals with specific illnesses, including heart disease, osteoporosis and cancer. For each type of disease, statistical information is followed by a discussion of risk factors and first-person commentary from a doctor. For example, Dr. Celeste Robb-Nicholson says, "When it comes to telling patients how to avoid lung cancer, the advice I offer is simple: if you smoke, quit." The last section of the book includes discussions on changing behavior in order to lose weight stop smoking, start exercising and reduce the risk of contracting various diseases. While this section contains some information that will be familiar to readers, it is the most practical and should be helpful to women ready to make lifestyle changes. This is a reference book women should be reading throughout their lives. (July)Forecast: Edited by Harvard Medical School faculty members (all of whom also work at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital), this book bears an imprimatur of scientific authority, and is likely to impress, and to sell well to, health-conscious women.Parenting

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; First edition (July 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684855194
• ISBN-13: 978-0684855196
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,156,816 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everyone Should Read This Book!, July 15, 2001

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Healthy Women, Healthy Lives: A Guide to Preventing Disease, from the Landmark Nurses' Health Study (Hardcover)

This book deserves more than five stars. It is by far the best resource on women's health issues that I have seen.

Review Summary: How can women improve their health by changing their lifestyle, diet, and activities? That's the question that this book answers. Based on the longest running and most authoritative sources of information, you should prefer the information here to what you will read in other resources. The book deals with factors like age, race, exercise, diet, use of supplements, weight, birth control pill and hormone replacement usage, smoking, and drinking in order to define how these affect the incidence of disease. In addition, the book also tells women how to improve their chances for avoiding diseases where where behavior counts for a lot.

Review: The detailed focus of this book is remarkable. Unlike most books about health that look at men and women together, this one drills down to many different perpectives on women. For instance, if you took oral contraceptives in the 1970s, what is the effect on your risk of breast cancer today? If you take supplementary calcium now, how does that affect your risk of having a bone fracture when you are past 70? These are the kind of specific, and important questions that this book looks at. And the data are not necessarily what you think. Calcium supplements, for instance, don't seem to help with reducing fractures. If you discontinued oral contraceptives some time ago, the impact on breast cancer incidence seems to drop off to nil.

The data for the book come from several long-term studies. The most significant is Harvard Medical School's Nurses' Health Study, which began in 1976. The base was 120,000 R.N.s aged 30-55. The original focus of this work was on oral contraceptives, but many other data were assembled in two page questionnaires sent every other year. Since then, biological samples have been added liked toenail clippings and blood. In 1989 116,000 more nurses were added in the Nurses' Health Study II, which tracks younger women than those in the earlier group who are now increasingly elderly. Nurses were originally chosen because it was thought they would be more accurate in their data and more likely to be open about sharing information about contraceptive and reproductive practices. Since then the National Institutes of Health have also started a tracking study focusing on the use of postmenopausal hormones, low fat diets, and the impact of calcium and other supplements on postmenopausal health. All three studies are used extensively in this book.

The book's first section looks at the studies and how to interpret the data that come from them. The second section (and the longest) looks at a different diseases. Instead of lumping cancer together, for instance, you get separate looks at breast, lung, colon, endometrial, ovarian, and skin cancer. Other dieases covered include heart disease, stroke, diabetes, osteoporosis, asthma, arthritis, eye ailments, and Alzheimer's. The final section is on advice about how to do better with physical activity, weight control, smoking, nutrients, foods, alcohol, vitamins and minerals, postmenopausal hormones, birth control, and aspirin.

Unlike many books coming from physicians, this book is easy to understand and apply. You get a lot of scientific data, but you also get lots of instances of plain English. For example, there are quotes from nurses and how one doctor provides advice in each section for what she or he tells patients about that subject. Also, each chapter has a simple, useful summary that you can use to put everything in perspective.

If the book has a weakness, it's that you cannot learn as much as you need to know about how to change difficult behaviors like smoking and eating foods that lead to excess weight in brief chapters. So, once you've decided you want to improve your behavior, I suggest that you also seek out other books that are more specialized on those issues.

Obviously, this book will be of interest and value to women. Why should men read it? I told my wife about how good I thought this book was, and she asked me how she should change her behavior based on the book's information. I was able to summarize for her in less than five minutes what I had observed that she could beneficially change. So this book can be valuable for men to read, if they share the information with women they know. Also, men can give this book to women as a token of their love and caring.

After you finish this book, I suggest that you also think about where you can get such authoritative information about other important subjects in your life . . . like getting along well with others, enjoying good mental health, feeling happy and optimistic, and giving and receiving love. Why not make improvements in all these dimensions?

Remember: You deserve the best that you can provide for yourself!

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well recommended, February 8, 2002

By 

H A Bagnall (Brooklyn,, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Healthy Women, Healthy Lives: A Guide to Preventing Disease, from the Landmark Nurses' Health Study (Hardcover)

The Landmark Nurse Health Study was enormously interesting and full of useful information,as well as being clearly and understandably written for the layperson. The authors enlisted the help of 170,000 nurses to track their health status over the past 25 years, by filling out questionnaires every few years, occasionally requesting blood samples and even nail clippings from some. This is a report on their work, which also cites many other studies, some that agree and others that disagree with the authors findings. They emphasize that this is the latest word, but not the last.
The researchers discuss at length those situations in which certain medications that are advantageous for one disorder may be disadvantageous for another. Choosing which way to go will require consideration of hereditary factors and family history, as well as consultation with ones primary care provider.
Asking nurses to do this kind of information gathering was well conceived, as we all know that nurses are meticulous record keepers, as well as being altruistic and concerned with the welfare of their fellow human beings.
I find myself quoting frequently from this book, as well as recommending it to all my women friends and relatives. I enjoyed reading it and benefited from the information it contained.

22 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars reader beware!, August 14, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Healthy Women, Healthy Lives: A Guide to Preventing Disease, from the Landmark Nurses' Health Study (Hardcover)

This book is touted as showing how to prevent disease through changing your lifestyle, right? Well, keep in mind that the authors never tried changing their subjects' lifestyles! So we really have no way of knowing whether if the nurses they studied had changed their diets, they would have been healthier or not. In medical science, the only way to really find these things out is to actually do a clinical trial...randomly assign people to different groups to follow a certain program and then see what program is best. These authors didn't do that so their results are just observational. You might see in your neighborhood that three women who like to wear lavender clothes all came down with cancer...does that prove that if you stop wearing lavender clothes you won't get cancer? These authors have never shown that they can prevent disease through their recommendations. The authors never treated these women as patients, in fact they never even saw them! Also keep in mind that all these results are just based on the subject's reports of what they ate, how much they weighed etc. The authors never verified that the answers were truthful. And they never measured the women's blood pressure or cholesterol levels or any other ordinary lab tests that your doctor does on a routine visit. So this book is really just a bunch of advice that sounds plausible but might or might not have any effect on preventing disease. Don't believe the hype!