Small increase in physical activity among US adults may prevent 110K deaths per year
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Increasing moderate-to-vigorous physical activity among individuals aged 40 years or older in the United States may prevent thousands of deaths per year, according to findings published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Specifically, increasing the population’s moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) per day by 10, 20 or 30 minutes was associated with a 6.9%, 13% and 16.9% decrease in the number of deaths per year, respectively, according to Pedro F. Saint-Maurice, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow in the division of cancer epidemiology and genetics at the National Cancer Institute, and colleagues.
“A manageable increase in daily activity can ... have a tremendous positive effect on patients at the population level,” Saint-Maurice told Healio.
The researchers used 1 week of accelerometer measurements from 4,840 participants aged 40 years or older who were enrolled in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Among the study cohort, 53% were women, and 77.4% were non-Hispanic white, 10.4% were non-Hispanic Black and 5.1% were Mexican American.
Saint-Maurice and colleagues estimated participants’ MVPA by totaling accelerometer minutes at or above an established cutoff point. They created eight categories to delineate the amount of physical activity completed per day (0 to 19, 20 to 39, 40 to 59, 60 to 79, 80 to 99, 100 to 119, 120 to 139 or 140 minutes). These data were used to assess the number of deaths that could be prevented per year with increased exercise, which were estimated as the adjusted population attribution fraction (PAF) based on annual deaths from 2003 for individuals in the U.S. aged 40 to 84 years.
During a mean follow-up of 10.1 years, 1,165 deaths occurred among the study cohort. Overall, adding 10 minutes per day of physical activity prevented an estimated 111,174 deaths per year (95% CI, 79,594-142,754), according to Saint-Maurice and colleagues. Greater benefits were observed with greater amounts of physical activity, with an estimated 209,459 deaths (95% CI, 146,299-272,619) prevented with 20 minutes of added physical activity and 272,297 deaths (95% CI, 177,557- 367,037) prevented with 30 minutes of added physical activity.
The researchers reported that the addition of 10 minutes of MVPA per day prevented 8% (95% CI, 6-10) of total deaths per year among men, 5.9% (95% CI, 2.-9.8) of total deaths per year among women, 4.8% (95% CI, 00-10.7) of total deaths per year among Mexican American individuals, 6.1% (95% CI, 2.2-10) of total deaths per year among non-Hispanic Black individuals and 7.3% (95% CI, 5.3-9.3) of total deaths per year among non-Hispanic white individuals.
The findings “highlight the broader public health benefit of increasing physical activity in the overall population,” Saint-Maurice said. “We hope that our finding will encourage clinicians to help patients adopt and maintain healthy activity levels”