Diabetes: Yet another reason not to sit

“The IMPACT 2 results show the benefit to people living with type 1 diabetes and the NHS in providing appropriate care, support and education to help people manage their condition”.

Those with type 2 diabetes, 29 percent of the total, spent up to 26 more minutes per day in sedentary situations than participants with normal sugar metabolism.

EACH extra hour of daily inactivity in the course of a week can increase the risk of Type 2 diabetes by more than a fifth, a study has found. “The more you sit, the higher the risk [for type 2 diabetes], regardless of how much you exercise”, affirmed van der Berg. “However, given the large amounts of time people spend being sedentary and the high prevalence of type 2 diabetes, such studies are important”, van der Berg and colleagues wrote.

TheSun report said, COUCH potatoes have an increasingly higher risk of diabetes the longer they laze, researchers have warned. However, as snap-shots of information, they can’t tell us whether one causes the other, because we don’t know which factor happened first.

“To date, large-scale studies that have objectively measured sedentary behavior in a population with type 2 diabetes have been scarce”.

The researcher said that considering the considering the increasing number of type 2 diabetes cases around the world and the increasing number of hours people spend sitting, studies like this are significant.

Public health minister Maureen Watt said the Scottish Government was “working hard”, in partnership with patients, families and interest groups to prevent more patients developing the disease and to treat those who are managing it every day. To determine diabetes status, participants underwent an oral glucose tolerance test.

Every extra hour of sedentary time raised the risk of being diabetic by 22%. During that time, van der Berg’s team calculated daily sedentary time, the number of sedentary breaks, prolonged sedentary periods – 30 minutes or more – and the average length of these sedentary periods. The study participants used the thigh-worn activPAL3 accelerometer, which classifies sedentary behaviour using data on posture, as this has shown to be an accurate means of assessing sedentary behaviour.

‘Consideration should be given to including strategies to reduce the amount of sedentary time in diabetes prevention programmes’.

Although the researchers adjusted their figures to take account of many confounding factors, they did not look at some other lifestyle aspects that could be important in developing diabetes, such as what people ate and family history of diabetes. How do you stay active in your 60s? This study gives one more potential reason to make sure you spend as much time as possible being physically active, whether that’s going to the gym, taking a walk, using the stairs instead of the lift, or just dancing around the kitchen while making dinner.