Another study on the dangers of sitting

Chronic disease and sitting time in middle-aged Australian males: findings from the 45 and Up Study

That is a link to the pdf of the full paper.

As usual, the NHS Choices site is pretty good at pointing out the limitations of the study before we all rush off and get too paranoid about things.

ConclusionThe results of this study suggest that there is an association between longer periods of time spent sitting down and diabetes and overall chronic disease in middle-aged Australian males.
Previous research has also found that the amount of time spent sitting down (‘sedentary behaviour’) is a risk factor for health, and that this risk factor is independent of the amount of time spent performing physical activity. This large study, which took into account several potential confounding variables, adds to this body of evidence. However, this study has limitations:

• Due to the cross-sectional study design, we cannot tell whether increased sitting time occurs before or after the development of chronic diseases.

• All of the data was self-reported by the men in the study. This means that it could have been affected by recall bias, or by under- or over-reporting.

• Not all people who were invited to complete the questionnaire did so. This means that there could have been a ‘selection bias’ in the recruitment of participants. This could have skewed the results either way – healthy people may have been more likely to respond or, alternatively, men more worried about their health may have been more likely to respond.

• It should also be remembered that this study was performed in middle-aged Australian men, and it is unclear whether the results can be generalised to other populations.

Despite these limitations, this study offers further support for the current physical activity recommendations for adults and the fact that physical inactivity can be bad for you.

Exercise of course is very good for you....