By Sola Ogundipe
A Cambridge research of nearly 1,500 adults found a correlation between lower quality of life and a decrease in the amount of time spent being physically active when adults are over 60.
The same was true for rises in sedentary pursuits like reading and watching TV. This underscores the need to encourage elderly people to maintain their level of activity, the study claims.
Physical activity is known to lower your chance of developing a number of diseases, including as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer, especially when it is moderately intense and increases your heart rate. Adults should engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity exercise each week.. Additionally, it is advised that older persons alternate extended stretches of inactivity with brief moments of light movement, or at the very least, standing, as this has clear advantages for their health.
A team led by researchers at the University of Cambridge examined activity levels among 1,433 participants aged 60 and above using accelerometers. The participants had been recruited to the EPIC (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer)-Norfolk study.
Along with this, the researchers also considered health-related quality of life, a metric of well-being that takes into account factors like pain, the capacity for self-care, and anxiety/mood. Based on their answers to a questionnaire, participants were assigned a score between 0 (lowest quality of life) and 1 (best). A higher likelihood of hospitalization, worse outcomes after hospitalization, and early death are all associated with lower quality-of-life scores.
An average of little under six years later, participants were checked on to see if their behavior or quality of life had changed. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes has released the study’s findings.
Both men and women were engaging in roughly 24 minutes less moderate-to-vigorous physical activity every day on average six years after their initial examination. At the same period, men’s and women’s daily averages for sedentary time climbed by roughly 33 minutes for men and 38 minutes for women.
A higher quality of life was later observed in those who engaged in more moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and spent less time sitting down at the initial assessment. A 0.02 higher quality of life score was linked to an hour more of daily activity.
Increases in sedentary behaviors were also linked to lower quality of life, with a 0.012-point decline in score for each additional minute of daily sedentary time six years after the initial evaluation. This indicates that a person’s score would have decreased by 0.18 if they had spent an additional 15 minutes a day sitting down. A 0.1-point increase in quality of life scores has previously been linked to a 6.9 percent decrease in early death and a 4.2 percent decrease in the chance of hospitalization, which helps put the findings into a clinical context.
Source: Vanguard
