Can sitting down for more than 11 hours be deadly for women?

By Sharin Hussain via SWNS

Sitting down for more than 11 hours a day increases the risk of death for older women by nearly a third, a new study claims.

And the bad news is that even bouts of sitting down for more than 11 hours a day increases the risk of death for older women by nearly a third, a new study claims make no difference to the results.

Researchers at the University of California followed 6,489 women aged 63 to 99 for eight years to reach their conclusions.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA), examined sitting and daily activity collected from hip devices worn for up to seven days.

Sedentary behavior is a health risk because it reduces muscle contractions, blood flow and glucose metabolism.

Dr. Andrea LaCroix of Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health said: “When you're sitting, the blood flow throughout your body slows down, decreasing glucose uptake.

“Your muscles aren't contracting as much, so anything that requires oxygen consumption to move the muscles diminishes, and your pulse rate is low.”

The study also found that exercise cannot undo these negative effects.

When women participated in low or high amounts of physical activity, they showed the same heightened risk if they sat for long hours.

Dr. LaCroix adds: “If I take a brisk long walk for an hour but sit the rest of the day, I'm still accruing all the negative effects on my metabolism.”

They recommend that people should get up once an hour, or every 20 minutes or so to prevent the risk and especially if you are someone that has to sit for over 11 hours.

They say that you don't have to go anywhere, you can just stand for a little while.

Co-author Dr. Steve Nguyen of Public Health and Human Longevity Science said: “Sedentary behavior is defined as any waking behavior involving sitting or reclining with low energy expenditure.

“Looking beyond conditions like cardiovascular disease, we start thinking about cognitive outcomes, including dementia.

“There are cognitively stimulating activities that can result in sedentary behavior, like sitting while studying a new language.

"Is sedentary behavior in that context overall bad for a person? I think it's hard to say.”

Dr. LaCroix concludes: “We've created this world in which it's so fascinating to sit and do things. You can be engrossed by TV or scroll on your Instagram for hours.

"But sitting all the time isn't the way we were meant to be as humans, and we could reverse all of that culturally just by not being so attracted to all the things that we do while sitting.”