Sitting for hours may raise type 2 diabetes risk by fifth

Wednesday 03 Feb 2016 - 14:08 Makkah mean time-24-4-1437

Amsterdam, Netherlands (IINA) - In a study carried out among 2,500 people, Dutch scientists calculated that every extra hour each day spent in a sedentary position increases the risk of type two diabetes by more than a fifth, Mail Online health news reported.
The experts have found that the longer someone spends inactive each day, the more likely they are to develop type two diabetes.
If you spend all day sitting at your desk, going to the gym in the evening may not undo the damage, research suggests.
Critically, even doing intense exercise does not reduce the impact of sitting for lengthy periods.
Researchers used a wearable device that detects motion to track the movement of the volunteers, who had an average age of 60.
Participants wore the accelerometer strapped to their thighs for 24 hours a day for eight consecutive days.
The results showed that those with type two diabetes were the least active, spending an extra 26 minutes on average sedentary each day.
Even when the researchers considered exercise patterns, people who had long periods of inactivity were still much more likely to be diabetic.
The scientists, from Maastricht University, calculated that each extra hour spent sedentary, above the average nine hours, increases the chance of being type two diabetic by 22 per cent.
The authors, led by Julianne van der Berg, said: ‘Our findings could have important implications for public health as they suggest that sedentary behaviour may play a significant role in the development and prevention of type two diabetes, independent of high-intensity physical activity.
‘Consideration should be given to including strategies to reduce the amount of sedentary time in diabetes prevention programmes.’
The researchers, whose results appear in the journal Diabetologia, considered the possibility that people with diabetes are only less active because of their ill-health. But they ruled this out when they discovered that excluding participants on insulin medication, who could be considered seriously ill, the results remained the same.
‘This may suggest that sedentary behaviour at least partly preceded type two diabetes,’ the team wrote.
Previous research has suggested that the link between inactivity and diabetes is due to contractions of muscle cells, which promote the metabolism of glucose.
The findings are likely to resonate among office workers who spend an average of 75 percent of their working day sitting in front of a computer screen as well as lorry and taxi drivers, checkout workers and aeroplane pilots.
Doctors are worried that this sedentary behaviour is also contributing to obesity and cancer.
It is also directly linked to back, neck and muscle pain - the cause of 131 million sick days each year.
Public Health England recently urged employers to persuade staff to spend at least two hours a day on their feet.
They recommended that employers set a ‘daily quota’ of time when their staff should be on their feet.
And they said all offices should have a number of higher desks where people can stand, staff should regularly walk around the office, and people should break up long-periods of sitting.
Dame Sally Davies, the Government’s chief medical officer, has called inactivity ‘a silent killer’.
She advises that adults spend 150 minutes a week, two and a half hours in moderate activity in bursts of ten minutes or more.
SM/IINA

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