Sedentary time alone may not fully explain AF risk in older women
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Prolonged sedentary time was associated with incident atrial fibrillation in older women, but adjustment for self-reported health and physical function suggested other patient characteristics may be at play, researchers reported.
According to research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the association between sedentary behavior and incident AF also became nonsignificant after additional adjustment for moderate to vigorous physical activity across quartiles of sedentary time.
“The health implications of sedentary behavior are distinct from those related to a lack of exercise, because sedentary time has been shown to be associated with cardiometabolic health even after statistically accounting for exercise and physical activity,” Brian C. Boursiquot, MD, MS, PGY-3 resident in internal medicine at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and colleagues wrote. “Despite the growing literature on sedentary behavior as a cardiovascular risk factor, AF has not been well studied as an outcome.”
To better understand the association between sedentary behavior and incident AF, researchers conducted the Objective Physical Activity and CV Health (OPACH) study, which included 2,675 women (mean age, 78 years) who wore a triaxial accelerometer for 1 week. Data on incident AF were gathered from Medicare claims.
Self-rated health status and physical function for each participant was assessed using the SF-36 survey.
Within the cohort, 10% experienced incident AF, at a rate of 31 cases per 1,000 person-years.
After adjustment for age, race/ethnicity, BMI, education, smoking, hypertension, diabetes, stroke, CVD and other chronic conditions, sedentary time equivalent to about 11 hours per day was associated with a 20% greater risk for incident AF among older women compared with sedentary time of about 7 hours (adjusted HR = 1.2; 95% CI, 0.81-1.78; P for trend = .05). However, after researchers adjusted for self-rated health and physical function, the association was no longer significant (P for trend = .12). Additional adjustment for minutes per day of moderate to vigorous physical activity also attenuated the association between sedentary time and incident AF (P for trend = .11).
“Total sedentary time and prolonged patterns of sedentary accumulation were associated with incident AF, but these associations were attenuated after multivariate adjustment,” the researchers wrote. “This suggests that associations between sedentary behavior and AF may be attributable to other patient characteristics. Future studies can be done to assess whether interventions that limit sedentary behavior can reduce rates of AF in older women, and to assess the influence of sedentary behavior on incident AF in other populations.”
Collapse
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts