San Diego – Who would have thought that Netflix binges and casual desk jobs could become so dangerous? Researchers at the University of California, San Diego suggest that avoiding sedentary behavior (such as sitting all day) may be the secret to living longer.Older women who sit for more than 11.7 hours a day have a higher risk of death 30 percent – Even if you exercise intensely!
While this is an alarming result, study co-author Steve Nguyen, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Geriatric Sciences, used the surprising sample size for his study. did. His team examined measurements of sitting time and daily activity collected from monitors worn by 6,489 women (ages 63 to 99) for up to a week. The researchers also followed the participants for eight years and monitored whether any of the women died.
The data was originally collected during a study led by Andrea LaCroix, Distinguished Professor at the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health. This is a larger, longer-term national project called the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), which began in 1991 and is still ongoing. This report is the first to use a newly validated machine learning algorithm (called CHAP) to analyze the relationship between total sitting time and length of sedentary activity and risk of premature death.
“Sedentary behavior is defined as waking behavior that involves sitting or lying down with low energy expenditure,” Nguyen said in the paper. university release. “Previous techniques for calculating sedentary behavior have used cutpoints that identify little or no movement. The CHAP algorithm uses machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence. The technology was developed to enhance the ability to accurately distinguish between standing and sitting.
It becomes “impossible” to recover from damage.
By fine-tuning the sitting style, Nguyen was able to differentiate and better assess total sitting time from the duration of normal sitting. In general, sedentary behavior is unhealthy because it reduces muscle contraction, blood flow, and sugar metabolism.
“When you sit, blood flow slows throughout your body, which reduces glucose uptake. Because your muscles aren’t contracting as much, you need less oxygen to use them to move them, which lowers your pulse rate. ,” Professor Lacroix explains.
Unfortunately, and rather surprisingly, exercise does not seem to be able to reverse these negative effects. The researchers found that whether women participated in low or high amounts of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity ultimately did not matter when combined with too much sitting. Regardless of the pattern of exercise, sitting for long periods of time was associated with a similar increased risk.
“If you take a brisk walk for an hour, but remain sedentary for the rest of the day, your metabolism continues to be negatively affected,” says Professor Lacroix.
So what should you do if you sit for too long?
“If you sit for about 11 hours per day, your risk starts to rise the longer you sit in a session. For example, if you sit for more than 30 minutes at a time, you sit for only 10 minutes at a time. The risk is higher than without it. Most people can’t wake up six times an hour, but some may wake up once an hour or every 20 minutes.You don’t have to go anywhere, just stand there for a while.” recommends Professor Lacroix.
Notably, Nguyen also notes that not all sitting positions are the same.
“We’re also starting to think beyond symptoms like cardiovascular disease to the cognitive effects, including dementia,” the researchers explain. “There are cognitively stimulating activities that can lead to sedentary behavior, such as sitting while learning a new language. Is sedentary behavior bad for people overall in that context?” I think it will be difficult.”
Dr. Nguyen recently completed the National Institute of General Medicine Research, a 12-month supervised study focused on the characteristics of proteins associated with physical activity and how they relate to dementia. Received the K99 Award. Professor Lacroix, on the other hand, sympathizes with the challenge of changing sedentary behavior once established, but emphasizes that it often requires modification.
“We’ve created this world where it’s so tempting to sit down and do something. You could be glued to the TV or scroll through Instagram for hours. But always… “Sitting is not what we’re supposed to be as humans, and culturally we can reverse all that by simply finding everything we do while sitting less appealing,” concludes Professor Lacroix. Masu.
of study Published in Journal of the American Heart Association.
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