Wearable devices can capture unexplored movement patterns such as brief bursts of vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity that is embedded into everyday life, rather than being done as a leisure time exercise.
Here, we examined the association of all-cause, cardiovascular disease, and cancer mortality in 25,241 nonexercisers (mean age 61.8 years, 14,178 women/11,063 men) in the UK Biobank. Over an average follow-up of 6.9 years, during which 852 deaths occurred, was inversely associated with all three of these outcomes in a near-linear fashion.
Compared with participants who engaged in no, participants who engaged in at the sample median frequency of 3 length-standardized bouts per day (lasting 1 or 2 min each) showed a 38%–40% reduction in all-cause and cancer mortality risk and a 48%–49% reduction in CVD mortality risk. Moreover, the sample median duration of 4.4 min per day was associated with a 26%–30% reduction in all-cause and cancer mortality risk and a 32%–34% reduction in CVD mortality risk. We obtained similar results when repeating the above analyses for vigorous physical activity in 62,344 UK Biobank participants who exercised (1,552 deaths, 35,290 women/27,054 men).
These results indicate that small amounts of vigorous nonexercise physical activity are associated with substantially lower mortality. The nonexercisers appear to elicit similar effects to exercisers, suggesting that may be a suitable physical activity target, especially in people not able or willing to exercise. Physical activity is associated with reduced mortality risk1 and reduced risk of CVD1 and certain cancers2,3,4. Recently updated guidelines4,5, based mostly on questionnaire-derived evidence, recommend 150–300 min of moderate-intensity activity or 75–150 min of vigorous-intensity physical activity (≥6 metabolic equivalents) per week.
The new emphasis is placed on ‘all activity counts’ occurring across all life domains and regardless of bout duration. This recommendation contrasts with previous guidelines6,7 that did not recognize the health value of physical activity bouts lasting <10 min. Besides, little evidence supports the previous guideline because questionnaires can typically capture only longer bouts (for example, ≥10 min) of physical activity and often concentrate on leisure time activities such as gym-based exercise,
running and The health effects of each time unit of physical activity are intensity dependent10,11,12,13. For a given volume of physical activity, higher contributions are associated with additional mortality risk reduction10,11,12,13. This is partly due to the enhanced cardiorespiratory adaptations it causes14 and the protection it offers against the development of certain cancers15,16. Although vigorous-intensity physical activity is time-efficient, vigorous structured exercise-based sessions (for example, gym-based, sports, high-intensity interval training) are not feasible or appealing to the majority of middle-aged adults,
as indicated by the very low participation rates8,9,17. Over a median follow-up of 3.1 years, a previous UK Biobank accelerometry study18 concluded that moderate- to vigorous-intensity activity was associated with greater reductions in all-cause mortality risk than lower-intensity activity.
However, was not specifically19 refer to brief and sporadic (for example, up to 1 or up to 2 min long) bouts of vigorous-intensity physical activity done as parts of daily living, such as bursts of very fast walking while commuting to work or moving from place to place, or stair climbing20. No cohort study has examined the associations with mortality or other prospective outcomes. For most adults, may be more feasible than structured exercise because it requires a minimal time commitment and involves no specific preparation, equipment, or access to facilities. Many common activities of daily living are likely to elicit relative vigorous-intensity effort in physically inactive adults with poor fitness who do not habitually exercise21, which is the majority demographic in many countries8,9,22,23.
In contrast to questionnaires, wearable devices such as wrist 24,25 or thigh 26,27 accelerometers continuously record movement at a high resolution allowing them to capture fine-grain patterns of brief physical activity bouts, such as 19. The rapidly growing use of wearable devices in research25,27,28,29,30 and among consumers31 offers opportunities to better understand the health-enhancing potential of an analogous unexplored movement ‘micro-patterns’. Such potential is greatly enhanced by the recent application of machine learning32,33,34 in studies using wearable devices to understand the health effects of movement.
- In a sample of UK Biobank participants with accelerometry data who reported no exercise in their leisure time, we examined the dose–response curves and minimum dose (daily duration and bout frequency) associated with all-cause, CVD, and cancer mortality risk. To provide a population-wide context for our findings, we also examined the dose-response associations of (exercise or nonexercise) with the same mortality outcomes among exercisers in
You must be logged in to post a comment.