Walking briskly for 20 minutes a day can cut risk of early death
A SWIFT daily stroll lasting as little as 20 minutes may stave off the risk of death caused by poor sleep.
A lack of rest is linked to a range of issues including the increased chance of an early death caused by a stroke, heart disease or cancer.
But researchers found a regular exercise routine helped minimise the risk of damaging conditions associated with a starvation of sleep.
The World Health Organisation recommends people have at least 600 metabolic equivalent minutes of physical activity per week – the equivalent of 150 minutes a week (or 20 minutes daily) of brisk walking or 75 minutes of running.
Healthy
Data from 380,055 people aged 56 on average (55 per cent women) was analysed for the UK Biobank study.
The amount of exercise people did was categorised as high, medium or low, while sleep was split into healthy, intermediate and poor.
Over an 11-year follow-up, 15,503 people died, of which 4,095 were from any type of cardiovascular disease and 9,064 from all types of cancer. Of these, 1,932 people died from coronary heart disease, 359 from a brain bleed (haemorrhagic) stroke, 450 from a blood clot (ischaemic) stroke and 1,595 from lung cancer.
After the follow-up, experts found that, compared with people in the high exercise group who also had healthy sleep, those in the low exercise and poor sleep group had a 57 per cent higher risk of early death from any cause.
Sixty-seven per cent had an increased chance of death from heart disease and 45 per cent from cancer.
However, the researchers said that if people met the lower end of theWHO guidelines for exercise, most of the links between poor sleep and death were eliminated.
The researchers, including those from the University of Sydney and University College London, said: “Our results support the value of interventions to concurrently target (physical activity) and sleep to improve health.”
The study was published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
But advice to exercise 30 minutes a day may not help everyone, researchers at the Glasgow Caledonian University found. They warned sitting too long afterwards could even “undo” benefits of exercise.
Instead, they say three minutes of exercise for every hour spent seated could extend a life by 30 per cent.