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Dena Campbell and her fellow seniors spend about an hour doing gentle exercises, including those with simple accouterments such as rope, at the North Plains Senior Center before a group sets off on their weekly "Walk With Ease" around town.

(Michal Thompson / The Argus )

Because they stay physically active and eat smart, Oregon's seniors have more healthy years ahead of them than folks in most other states.

The

released a

Thursday that put Oregon's healthy-life expectancy after 65 -- the length of the time after retirement-age that one can expect to stay healthy -- at 15 years, ranking it with the top quarter of U.S. states.

Improving healthy life expectancy is a major concern of researchers who study older populations.

Though the report also calculates total post-65 life expectancy -- for Oregon it's 19.3 years -- it's the first government study to give state-by-state data on seniors' estimated years of sound health.

As people live longer in the United States, focus has turned to increasing the proportion of those years that a person is healthy, and that's been tough, said Dr. Balz Frei at

"That's one of the big challenges we have in this country, to close that gap so that people live long healthy lives, and not long miserable lives," Frei said.

Oregon tied with four other states -- Arizona, Massachusetts, South Dakota and Utah -- for ninth through 13th place for number of healthy years after retirement-age. Washington did slightly better at 15.1 years, and Hawaii came out on top with 16.2 years.

The worst region for a long, healthy life? The South, by far.

Mississippi ranked last with a post-65 healthy life expectancy of 10.8 years, followed by nearly seven years of poor health. Kentucky, Alabama and West Virginia followed close behind.

Southern states tend to have higher rates of smoking, obesity, diabetes, heart disease and a range of other illnesses. They also have social issues that affect long-term health, such as less education and more poverty.

Because these problems build up over a lifetime, flocking to Oregon or Hawaii from the a Southern state after retirement may not improve your quality of life, says Dr. Paula Yoon, co-author of the

. It's impossible to determine whether states are providing healthier environments, or whether the people who live there are already healthier, she explained.

"It's a snapshot in time," Yoon said. The estimates were made using 2007 through 2009 data from the census, death certificates and telephone surveys that asked people to describe their health. Since they're based on past data, these numbers can't definitively predict today's 65-year-old Oregonian's healthy life expectancy.

However, that doesn't mean that Oregon itself isn't contributing to healthier lives, Yoon said. The four key factors for healthy aging -- a safe and healthy environment, healthy behaviors, clinical preventative services and access to quality health care -- are greatly influenced by where people live.

Efforts to make Oregon's cities, including Portland, Bend, Salem and Eugene, more walkable and livable over past decades could be keeping older Oregonians healthier, said

, a geriatrician at

. She added that Oregon's at-home health care system allows Oregonians to live at home instead of in nursing homes, which could lead them to report their quality of life to be better.

Elderly Oregonians also are generally more active and eat a better diet than in other states, Eckstrom said.

In the coming years, Oregon must accommodate a burgeoning geriatric population. As baby-boomers hit their golden years, Oregon's elderly population will grow by 48 percent between 2010 to 2020, according to

. In 2012, 14.9 percent of the

was over 64 – the 12th highest in the nation.

Across all states, women fared better than men. Women, on average, lived 14.8 healthy years after retirement while men lived 12.9.

Eckstrom pointed out that the tool for measuring healthy lives is still quite crude, and that more robust data could lead to improved efforts to increase the percent of healthy years a person has left.

"I don't want to be 80 percent, I want to be 99 percent," she said. "I would actually like the healthy life expectancy and the life expectancy to be equal."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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