HQ Team
November 19, 2024: A sedentary lifestyle of more than 10.6 hours a day increases heart disease by up to 60%, according to a study by Mass General Brigham researchers.
Sedentary behaviour was associated with a higher risk for all four types of heart disease even among those who get enough exercise, according to the researchers.
Coronary heart disease occurs when blood flow to the heart muscle is reduced or blocked, and congenital heart defects happen due to structural problems in the heart or major blood vessels present at birth.
The third disease is heart failure when the heart cannot pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs. Arrhythmia is an irregular heartbeat.
Sedentary behaviour is defined as waking activity with low energy expenditure while sitting, reclining, or lying down and does not include hours spent sleeping at night.
‘Sitting too much’
Meeting guideline levels of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity may be insufficient to reduce cardiovascular risk if one also sits too much, the researchers said in a statement.
“Many of us spend the majority of our waking day sitting, and while there’s a lot of research supporting the importance of physical activity, we knew relatively little about the potential consequences of sitting too much beyond a vague awareness that it might be harmful,” said lead author Ezimamaka Ajufo, a cardiology fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
“Sedentary risk remained even in people who were physically active, which is important because many of us sit a lot and think that if we can get out at the end of the day and do some exercise we can counterbalance it,” Ajufo says. “However, we found it to be more complex than that.”
Ajufo’s team, which included researchers from across Mass General Brigham, analysed one week of activity-tracker data from 89,530 individuals from the U.K. Biobank prospective cohort.
Physical activity
They looked at associations between daily time spent sitting and the future risk of four common cardiovascular diseases: atrial fibrillation, heart attacks, heart failure, and death from cardiovascular causes.
The team used a machine learning algorithm to classify sedentary behaviour.
Many of the negative effects of sedentary behaviour persisted even among those individuals who achieved the guideline-recommended more than 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week.
Although the study found that the risk of atrial fibrillation and heart attacks could be mostly eliminated by engaging in physical activity, the excess risk of heart failure and cardiovascular death could only be partially offset by physical activity.
“Our data supports the idea that it is always better to sit less and move more to reduce heart disease risk and that avoiding excessive sitting is especially important for lowering the risk of heart failure and cardiovascular death,” said co-senior author Shaan Khurshid, an electrophysiologist.
Research on other diseases
The researchers plan to extend this research to investigate the impacts of sedentary behaviour on a range of other diseases and for longer periods.
“Exercise is critical, but avoiding excessive sitting appears separately important,” said co-senior author Patrick Ellinor, a cardiologist and co-director of the Corrigan Minehan Heart Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Our hope is that this work can empower patients and providers by offering another way to leverage movement behaviors to improve cardiovascular health.”
Their results were published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
