Researchers of a new study found that people who lead a highly sedentary lifestyle are at a greater risk of heart failure. This risk can be cut down by "sitting less", according to a Kaiser Permanente study.
This is yet another study that highlights the health issues of low physical activities and indulging in too much of sedentary behavior. Researchers of the study found that men who sit for more than five hours a day outside of work and exercise infrequently are more than twice as likely to develop heart failure as men who are more physically active and sit for less than two hours a day.
"Though traditionally we know quite a bit about the positive impact that physical activity has on cardiovascular disease, we know significantly less about the relationship between physical activity and heart failure," Deborah Rohm Young, the study's lead author and a researcher at the Kaiser Permanente Southern California Department of Research & Evaluation, said in a statement. "The results of this large study of a racially and ethnically diverse population reinforce the importance of a physically active and, importantly, a non-sedentary lifestyle for reducing the risk of heart failure."
The study examined the electronic health records of more than 82,000 men aged 45 years and older. These men were followed for a period of 10 years and didn't have any records of a heart failure at the time of enrollment. At the end of the study, researchers found that men who were less active physically were at a 52 percent higher risk of heart failure than people who regularly exercised.
According to the American Heart Association, 1 in 5 Americans suffer from a heart failure at some point in time after they cross the age of 40 years. Heart failures occur when the heart fails to maintain proper blood flow throughout the body.
"If you've been sitting for an hour, you've been sitting too long," James Levine, co-director of Obesity Solutions at Mayo Clinic in Phoenix and Arizona State University, told USA Today. Levine was a pioneer of research on sitting disease, but was not involved in this study. "My gut feeling is you should be up for 10 minutes of every hour."
This is not the first time a study has highlighted the negative impacts of a sedentary lifestyle on the health of a person. After examining 22,000 people, a 2012 study concluded that people who sit for more than 11 hours a day are at a 40 percent higher risk of dying prematurely from any cause.
"The evidence on the detrimental health effects of prolonged sitting has been building over the last few years," study author Hidde van der Ploeg told HealthDay in 2012. "The study stands out because of its large number of participants and the fact that it was one of the first that was able to look at total sitting time. Most of the evidence to date had been on the health risks of prolonged television viewing.
In 2011, NY Times ran an article highlighted how sitting is a lethal activity. It showed how quickly body parts tend to lose their capabilities when left inactive for long durations. According to the report, leg muscles in rats that were forced to be sedentary lost 75 percent of their ability to remove harmful lip-proteins from the blood. Furthermore, human subjects who were asked to remain inactive for 24 hours recorded a 40 percent reduction in their bodies' ability to take up glucose.
