Daily training for more than 10 minutes can reduce mortality: study | Photo credit: iStock Images
Washington: According to a team of researchers, increasing daily exercise for more than 10 minutes could prevent more than 100,000 deaths. According to Fox News, in a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine (JAMA Network), a team from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used the activity monitor data to estimate the public health impact of small increases in physical activity in the adult US population.
The authors estimated that if adults aged 40 to 85 or older increased their moderate-to-vigorous physical activity by 10 minutes a day, about 6.9% of annual deaths could be prevented, or 111,174 preventable deaths per year. More benefits were linked to larger increases in activity, with similar benefits seen for men, women, Mexican Americans, non-Hispanic Black Americans, and non-Hispanic White Americans.
While previous studies “depended on less reliable self-reports of physical activity, convenience sampling in selecting cohorts, and relatively large increases in population activity levels,” the authors note. used activity monitor data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), according to the NIH National Cancer Institute. The data included an oversample of black Americans and non-Hispanic Mexicans. The researchers matched one week of activity monitor data from NHANES participants between 2003 and 2006 with National Death Index data available through the end of 2015.
“To our knowledge, this is the first study to estimate the number of preventable deaths from physical activity using accelerometer-based measures in American adults while recognizing that increased activity can may not be possible for everyone. However, [one] week of monitoring may not reflect changes in activity over time and the observational study design limits direct determination of causality,” the authors wrote.
The National Cancer Institute pointed out that previous studies have shown that physical activity improves human health, reducing the risk of several chronic diseases that cause premature death, including certain cancers.
