Counteracting Risk Of Death And CVS In Highly Sedentary People

Lead author and research fellow, Dr Matthew Ahmadi said: "This is by no means a get out of jail card for people who are sedentary for excessive periods of time, however, it does hold an important public health message that all movement matters and that people can and should try to offset the health consequences of unavoidable sedentary time by upping their daily step count."

"Step count is a tangible and easily understood measure of physical activity that can help people in the community, and indeed health professionals, accurately monitor physical activity. We hope this evidence will inform the first generation of device-based physical activity and sedentary behaviour guidelines, which should include key recommendations on daily stepping," said senior author Professor Emmanuel Stamatakis, Director of the Mackenzie Wearables Research Hub at the Charles Perkins Centre.

For this observational study data from the UK Biobank from 72,174 people with an average age of 61 years old who wore accelerometer devices for seven consecutive days was utilized, following their health trajectory to link hospitalization and death record. The median step count was 6222 steps/day, and the lowest step count was 2200 steps/day among all participants (lowest 5%) which was taken for comparative reasons. Median sedentary time was 10.6 hours/day, the researchers considered 10.5 hours/day as being high, and less was considered as low. 

According to the researchers, over an average of 6.9 years of follow-up, there were 1633 deaths and 6190 CVD events. After taking into account various potential influences, the calculated optimal number of steps per day to counteract the being highly sedentary was between 9000 to 10,000 steps, these amounts lowered the risk of mortality by 39% and the risk of CVD incident by 21%. However, for both the risk of death and CVD incidents, 50% of the benefit was achieved by taking between 4000 to 4500 steps per day. 

"Any amount of daily steps above the referent 2200 steps/day was associated with lower mortality and incident CVD risk, for low and high sedentary time. Accruing between 9000 and 10,000 steps a day optimally lowered the risk of mortality and incident CVD among highly sedentary participants,” the authors concluded.