Living a sedentary lifestyle has been shown to harm overall health and well-being, sitting too much every day can be especially harmful to your heart and is linked to an increased risk of heart failure, heart attack, stroke, and even death.
A new study recently published in JACC that was also presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2024 suggests that sitting for 10.6 hours or longer a day is significantly linked to the risk of heart failure and cardiovascular death risk. Moreover, the risk remains increased in those who are meeting the recommended 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous (MVPA) exercise each week.
Cardiovascular disease is a serious public health concern. Exercise and physical activity have been shown to be an effective way to help reduce the risk of future health conditions. Unfortunately, most people spend the majority of their day sitting, for this reason, it is important to understand how prolonged sitting and sedentary behavior may affect health, and if we can mitigate these effects with exercise and physical activity.
Prolonged sitting increases risks
For this study, data was analyzed from close to 90,000 participants with an average age of 62 years old who were registered in the UK Biobank. These participants also wore triaxial accelerometers for over 7 days to measure their movements.
The analysis revealed that after a median follow-up of eight years, 5% of the participants developed atrial fibrillation, 2.1% developed heart failure, 2% had a heart attack, and 1% died from cardiovascular-related causes.
Additionally, the risks for myocardial infarction were found to steadily increase over time. However, this risk increase was minimal for those who experienced heart failure or cardiovascular-related death until their sedentary sitting time increased to over 10.6 hours every day. At this amount of time, the researchers reported that their risk significantly increased.
“For these conditions, there appeared to be an ‘inflection point’ of risk at this 10.6-hour threshold. That means that getting as many people as possible to avoid this level of sedentary behavior may be particularly important for the risk of heart failure and cardiovascular mortality,” explained the study co-senior author Shaan Khurshid, MD, MPH, cardiac electrophysiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Increased risk even when meeting activity guidelines
For those meeting the recommended 150 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous exercise (MVPA) each week or more, the sedentary lifestyle behavior-related heart attack and atrial fibrillation risks were substantially reduced. However, meeting the activity guidelines did not lower the sedentary lifestyle behavior-related increased risk for heart failure and cardiovascular death.
“People who are more sedentary also tend to engage in less exercise or MVPA. Among people who met guideline-recommended levels of MVPA, effects of sedentary behavior on atrial fibrillation and myocardial infarction risks were substantially reduced, suggesting that much or all of the excess risk associated with sedentary behavior is related to insufficient MVPA,” Khurshid explained.
“But for heart failure and cardiovascular mortality, strong associations with increased risk persisted even among individuals who were active, suggesting that excess sedentary behavior is associated with greater risk above and beyond the effects of insufficient activity for those two conditions,” he added.
Exercising is not enough to offset a sedentary lifestyle
For hundreds of thousands of people who have sitting jobs, this study suggests that avoiding excess sedentary behavior is important for even those who get enough exercise.
“Our advice would be to try to work in ways to avoid too much sitting into the day, such as fitting in walking time or trying to incorporate some standing into the day — e.g., using a standing desk if that is an option. We also saw that the effects of excess sitting did appear somewhat ‘dose-dependent’, where lowering the number of days of the week above the 10.6-hour threshold was also important. So even if they cannot avoid excess sedentary time on all days, even reducing it on some days is still potentially helpful,” said Shaan Khurshid, MD, MPH.
“We measured physical activity for one week, which is customary in studies using activity trackers. We plan to follow up our findings using longer durations of monitoring. There is reason to believe that sedentary behavior may affect disease risk far beyond cardiovascular disease, so we also plan to investigate associations across the full spectrum of health,” Khurshid added.
Move more
If find yourself sitting in front of a computer for most of the day, try to take phone calls while standing or walking in place. Set an alarm for every half an hour to stand up, stretch, and take a lap around your desk. Go for a walk during breaks and take the stairs more. You can also stand up and stretch in place a few times a day while practicing yoga. Consider working in a few exercise snacks throughout the day of short 10-20 second bursts of activity like dashing up the stairs.
Walk or ride a bike to work or get off a stop early on your commute to walk the rest of the way. Having a reusable water bottle will help you to get up and move more as you need to refill it. You can also wake up early to exercise before work or exercise on the way home. Standing desks can help greatly, but if that is not an option try to stand, stretch, and move as much as you can throughout the day.
As with anything you read on the internet, this article should not be construed as medical advice; please talk to your doctor or primary care provider before changing your wellness routine. WHN does not agree or disagree with any of the materials posted. This article is not intended to provide a medical diagnosis, recommendation, treatment, or endorsement. Additionally, it is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.
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References/Sources/Materials provided by:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0735109724099200?via%3Dihub
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2712935
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2792959?resultClick=1
https://professional.heart.org/en/meetings/scientific-sessions
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8582919
https://worldhealth.net/news/sitting-too-long-linked-higher-risk-premature-death
Activity Snacks Throughout The Day May Help Build Muscle – WorldHealth.net
No Time To Exercise, Consider Snacks – WorldHealth.net
https://worldhealth.net/news/counteracting-risk-death-and-cvs-highly-sedentary-people/
