A new study by a team of scientists from the universities of Southern California and Arizona was published in the journal JAMA. As part of their work, they determined that people aged 60 years and older who spend a lot of time with little or no movement – for example, sitting in front of the TV or sitting a lot behind the wheel of a car, there is an increased risk of developing dementia.
It was found that the risk increases exponentially in those who spend more than 10 hours a day in a sedentary lifestyle. Moreover, as part of the work, it was determined that it does not matter how exactly a sedentary lifestyle accumulates – whether there are breaks during the day for walks, but what is important is how much time in general a person spends sitting.
The work was based on data from the British Biobank. In an additional study, more than 100,000 adults agreed to wear accelerometers, devices on the arm that measure movement. The wearing period was 24 hours a day for a week. The researchers focused on a sample of 50,000 adults over 60 years of age who did not have a history of dementia at the start of the study.
Next, a machine learning algorithm was applied, with the help of which a large data set of accelerometer readings was studied. The behavior of the subjects was also checked based on different intensities of physical activity. After 6 years of follow-up, it was found that there were 414 cases of dementia. Additional adjustments were made for other risk factors affecting brain function, for example, age, gender, presence of chronic diseases, etc. It turned out that 10 hours of sedentary lifestyle or more sharply increases the risk of developing a neurodegenerative disease, but the figure is less than 10 hours does not have such a negative effect.
It has not yet been possible to determine a cause-and-effect relationship. Further work is required, the scientists emphasized.
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Source: aif.ru
