A sedentary lifestyle can result in a large number of health issues, including metabolic disorders, heart problems and cancer. It could possibly also affect longevity. Researchers have now found that sitting for greater than 10 hours a day increases the danger of dementia in people aged above 60.

The newest study, published in Jama Network, suggests that total sedentary time, no matter the pattern through which they’re accrued day by day, elevates the danger of dementia, the disorder that affects memory and pondering.

“Lots of us are accustomed to the common advice to interrupt up long periods of sitting by getting up every half-hour or so to face or walk around. We desired to see if those kinds of patterns are related to dementia risk. We found that after you take into consideration the overall time spent sedentary, the length of individual sedentary periods didn’t really matter,” study writer David Raichlen said in a news release.

Researchers used data from over 50,000 participants of the U.K. Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database, to guage the possible links between sedentary time and dementia risk. All of the participants, who were above 60 years of age, were asked to wear accelerometers to measure their movements. None of them were diagnosed with dementia at the beginning of the study.

The team used a machine-learning algorithm to investigate the dataset and classified the participants based on the intensity of physical activity. After around six years, there have been 414 cases of dementia.

“Our latest study is a component of our larger effort to know how sedentary behavior affects brain health from multiple perspectives. On this case, wearable accelerometers provide an objective view of how much time people dedicate to sedentary behavior that enhances our past analyses,” Raichlen said.

The newest study suggests that although high amounts of sedentary time increase dementia risk, lower levels of sedentary behavior, like sitting for lower than 10 hours a day, don’t elevate the danger.

“We were surprised to seek out that the danger of dementia begins to rapidly increase after 10 hours spent sedentary every day, no matter how the sedentary time was accrued. This means that it’s the overall time spent sedentary that drove the connection between sedentary behavior and dementia risk, but importantly lower levels of sedentary behavior, as much as around 10 hours, weren’t related to increased risk,” said Gene Alexander, one other study writer.

“This could provide some reassurance to those of us with office jobs that involve prolonged periods of sitting, as long we limit our total day by day time spent sedentary,” Raichlen added.

Published by Medicaldaily.com