According to recent research in JAMA, there is a link between sedentary lifestyle and incident dementia. The new findings show the more time older adults spend sitting, the greater their risk of developing all-cause dementia.
For the current study, the research team analyzed data on 49,841 adults from the UK Biobank. Their age was 60 years and over. Also, none of them was diagnosed with dementia when they wore an accelerometer.
Follow-up began when participants wore an accelerometer from February 2013 to December 2015, lasting until September 2021 in England, July 2021 in Scotland, and February 2018 in Wales.
The analysis of the accelerometer readings has shown that the more time senior adults spent sitting, the higher their chances were to develop all-cause dementia.
Matthew Stults-Kolehmainen, PhD, an exercise physiologist and researcher at Yale New Haven, says: “Excessive sitting and other sedentary behaviors are associated with obesity and being overweight, certain cancers, hypertension and metabolic disease, and even mental health problems, like depression and dementia. There is a place for the couch, and everyone deserves a break, but we should not be anchored to our furniture if we are concerned at all about physical and mental health.”