United States: New research shows that sitting at your desk all day can increase your risk of heart disease, even if you exercise in your free time. Dr. Ezim Ajufo, a cardiology expert, says it’s important to avoid sitting too much, whether or not you’re active outside of work.
People know that sitting for long periods is probably unhealthy but there is insufficient data to identify the risk factors and the recommended limits on sitting time said Dr. Keith Diaz, an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University. He had nothing to do with the research.
As reported by KSL.com, Diaz noted that sitting was particularly investigated well in this study owing to the size of the sample as well as the methodology used.
Scientists analyzed information from 88 517 participants who wore an accelerometer for a week and correlated their sedentary and active time with later development of such diseases as stroke, heart attack and heart failure, based on the study published in Journal of the American College of Cardiology on Friday.
Not only was it identified that more sitting was linked with higher risk for cardiovascular disease but with these data a tentative general rule of what might be too much sitting was given by the study.
” We would really like to see that the number of hours people spend on their butts to be not more than 10.6 hours a day,” Ajufo said. ‘It’s not an exact divide, but it seems logical starting point where we should set initial guidelines and where public health should start intervening.’
Why sitting is so bad.
They are also some few disadvantages when it comes to data.
The data was from the UK Biobank, a large biomedical database and long-term study of people’s health. Notably, most of the participants in the sample were White and of European descent, and thus the study sample may not be fully generalizable to the U.S. population, Ajufo said.
The study is also observational, so while it can identify correlations, it cannot prescribe that the sitting was in fact the reason for the heart disease, she continued.