Highlights
- Sitting time is closely associated with a sedentary lifestyle and is considered as a risk for diabetes.
- Results of a 13-year study indicate that there was little evidence for associations between sitting time at work and the risk of developing diabetes.
- There was a link between TV viewing and diabetes which may be influenced by snacking, exposure to unhealthy foods and poor mental health.
Associate Professor Stamatakis and colleagues from the University of Exeter, University College London and Victoria University, Australia, analysed responses from a long term health study completed by 4811 middle-aged and older London-based office workers who were initially free of diabetes and major cardiovascular disease.
In 1998 the participants were asked to report the amount of time they spent on various sitting behaviors including at work and commuting, leisure time and watching television.
They then examined clinical data based on blood glucose levels from the same cohort until the end of 2011 to determine whether new cases of diabetes occurred over the 13-year follow-up period, adjusting for confounding factors such as physical activity, quality of the diet, employment grade, alcohol and smoking habits, general health status and baseline body mass index (BMI) of the participants.
In total, 402 cases of incident diabetes occurred during the follow-up period, yet there was little evidence for associations between sitting and diabetes and these weak associations were limited to TV sitting time. "While these findings don't exonerate sitting, they do suggest that there is far more at play than we previously realised when it comes to sedentary behaviors and the health risks associated with extended sitting."
Many previous studies also rarely acknowledge how higher BMI at the outset of the study increases the participant's risk of developing diabetes, which could compromise study results.
Reference
- Emmanuel Stamatakis et al., Sitting behaviour is not associated with incident diabetes over 13 years: the Whitehall II cohort study, British Journal of Sports Medicine (2017) http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2016-096723
Source-Medindia