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• Posted November 15, 2024

Get Off the Couch: Another Study Shows Sitting's Health Dangers

Time spent sitting, reclining or lying down during the day could increase a person’s risk of heart disease and death, a new study warns.

More than 10 and a half hours of sedentary behavior is significantly linked with future heart failure and heart-related death, even among people who are getting the recommended amount of exercise, researchers report.

“Our findings support cutting back on sedentary time to reduce cardiovascular risk, with 10.6 hours a day marking a potentially key threshold tied to higher heart failure and cardiovascular mortality,” said co-senior researcher Dr. Shaan Khurshid, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “Too much sitting or lying down can be harmful for heart health, even for those who are active.”

These results jibe with another study published recently in the journal PLOS One, which found that the aging of people’s hearts hastened as they spent more time sitting. This occurred even if people met minimum daily exercise recommendations.

For the new study, researchers analyzed data on nearly 90,000 people participating in the U.K. Biobank ongoing research project. The average sedentary time per day was 9.4 hours for the participants.

After an average follow-up of eight years, about 5% developed an irregular heartbeat, 2% developed heart failure, just under 2% suffered a heart attack and about 1% died of heart-related disease, researchers found.

Sedentary behavior steadily increased people’s risk of irregular heartbeat and heart attack over time, researchers found.

People’s risk for heart failure and heart-related death remained minimal until they clocked more than 10.6 hours of sedentary time daily. At that point, the risk rose significantly.

Sitting around increased a person’s risk of heart failure and heart-related death even if they were getting 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity a week as recommended.

“Future guidelines and public health efforts should stress the importance of cutting down on sedentary time,” Khurshid said in a news release. “Avoiding more than 10.6 hours per day may be a realistic minimal target for better heart health.”

In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Charles Eaton, with Brown University in Rhode Island, noted that people tend to significantly overestimate their amount of exercise and underestimate their sedentary behavior.

Replacing just 30 minutes of excessive sitting time each day with any type of physical activity can lower heart health risks, wrote Eaton, director of the Center for Primary Care and Prevention at Brown.

Adding moderate-to-vigorous activity cut the risk of heart failure by 15% and heart-related death by 10%, and even light activity made a difference by reducing heart failure risk by 6% and heart-related death by 9%.

The new study was published Nov. 15 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, and researchers presented their findings recently at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association.

More information

Johns Hopkins Medicine has more on “sitting disease.”

SOURCE: American College of Cardiology, news release, Nov. 15, 2024