There is good news in a study being published in the Lancet journal that suggests a large reduction (20-35%) in risk of death in people aged 35-70 who engage in moderate to high levels of physical exercise. This included recreational as well as non-recreational exercise. Physical activity was graded as low (<150 minutes per week of moderate intensity physical activity), moderate (150-750 minutes per week), or high (>750 minutes per week). So I guess that many of us who do not engage in physical exercise as part of our jobs would fall into the moderate exercise category. The effect on death was 'dose-dependent' - in other words the more exercise somebody does the lower the risk of death. There will be caveats to this. If you have never run more than 5 K and then you decide to run a marathon, I suspect it wouldn't do you any good! The findings were about physical activity sustained over a 7 year period. So yet another reason for consistency in training!
Reference Lear SA, Hu W, Rangarajan S, Gasevic D, Leong D, Iqbal R et al. The effect of physical activity on mortality and cardiovascular disease in 130,000 people from 17 high-income, middle-income, and low-income countries: the PURE study. Lancet 2017; [Epub ahead of print] Comments are closed.
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Hamish McAllister-Williams
UKA Level 2 Archives
January 2019
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