Sitting down too long kills 50,000 Brits each year
Sedentary lifestyles carry increased risks for several serious diseases, modelling reveals.
Nearly 50,000 people in Britain die each year from diseases related to sitting down too much.
That’s the key finding of a study led by Leonie Heron of Queen’s University Belfast, UK, and published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. The researchers found that the British National Health Service (NHS) spends more than $1.3 billion a year on problems stemming from a lazy lifestyle, which the paper defines as sitting or lying down for more than six hours of waking time each day.
The researchers calculated the costs and mortality of diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and lung cancer and adjusted for comorbidity – the concurrence of multiple diseases.
They then compared their results to the overall death rate in Britain.
“The results suggested that 11.6% of all-cause mortality was associated with sedentary behaviour,” they conclude.
“Therefore, 48,024 deaths might have been avoided in 2016 if sedentary behaviour was eliminated in the UK.”