There's
a direct relationship between time spent sitting and your risk of early
mortality of any cause, researchers said, based on a study of nearly
8,000 adults. As your total sitting time increases, so does your risk of
an early death.
"The REGARDS study was originally
designed to examine why blacks (and particularly blacks in the Southern
US) have a greater risk for stroke than whites," said Diaz. He and his
co-researchers tracked for an average of four years 7,985 black and
white adult participants, age 45 or older, who had signed on to
participate in the REGARDS project.
Story highlights
- As total sedentary time increased, so did early death by any cause
- Negative effects of sitting were not lessened by age, sex, race, BMI or even exercise habits
(CNN)Take
a movement break every 30 minutes, say experts. No matter how much you
exercise, sitting for excessively long periods of time is a risk factor
for early death, a new study published Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine found.
There's
a direct relationship between time spent sitting and your risk of early
mortality of any cause, researchers said, based on a study of nearly
8,000 adults. As your total sitting time increases, so does your risk of
an early death.
The positive news: People who sat for less than 30 minutes at a time had the lowest risk of early deat"Sit less, move more"
is what the American Heart Association encourages all of us to do. But
this simplistic guideline doesn't quite cut it, said Keith Diaz, lead
author of the new study and an associate research scientist in the
Columbia University Department of Medicine.
"This would be like telling someone to just 'exercise' without telling them how," Diaz wrote in an email.
Exercise guidelines are precise, he explained. For example, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends adults
do moderate-intensity aerobic exercise for two hours and 30 minutes
every week, plus muscle strengthening activities on two or more days a
week.
To
measure sedentary time for these adults, the research team used
hip-mounted accelerometers. During the study period, the team recorded
340 total deaths considered "all-cause mortality" -- any death,
regardless of cause.
Analyzing the
data, the team found that sedentary behavior, on average, accounted for
about 12.3 hours of an average 16-hour waking day.
"As we age, and our physical and mental function declines, we become more and more sedentary," wrote Diaz.
Previous studies of adults have found
daily sitting time to average just nine to 10 hours per day. The higher
average in his own study is likely "due to the fact we studied a middle-
and older-aged population," Diaz wrote. "It could also be partly due to
the fact that we used an activity monitor to track sedentary time
rather than using self-report."
Measuring duration, the researchers clocked participants sitting, on average, for 11.4 minutes at a stretch.
As
total sedentary time increased, so did early death by any cause, the
results indicated. And the same was true for longer sitting stretches.
Overall then, participants' risk of death grew in tandem with total
sitting time and sitting stretch duration -- no matter their age, sex,
race, body mass index or exercise habits.
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