20 more minutes of daily exercise lowers hospitalization risk for common ailments

Exercising 20 minutes more every day was associated with a reduced hospitalization risk for a variety of common health conditions, including infection, stroke, venous thromboembolism and more, according to data in JAMA Network Open.

Eleanor L. Watts, DPhil, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute, and colleagues wrote that, though it is clear that higher levels of physical activity are linked to lower risks for CVD, cancer and diabetes, little is known about associations with many common health conditions that, though less severe, still impose large burdens on health care and reduce quality of life.

“To date, large-scale prospective analyses of physical activity and disease risk have been almost entirely based on self-reported physical activity, which primarily captures leisure-time activity of moderate to vigorous intensity and is more susceptible to measurement error and biases, leading to uncertainty regarding the association between physical activity and health outcomes,” the researchers wrote.

Accelerometers, however, measure the duration, intensity and frequency of physical activity “and capture the totality of activity throughout the day, such as incidental and/or unstructured activity, which is an important contributor to total physical activity energy expenditure,” they added.

Watts and colleagues conducted a prospective cohort study to better understand the connections between physical activity measured by accelerometers and hospitalization risk for 25 common conditions and assess how many hospitalizations would have been prevented with higher physical activity levels.

The researchers used data from 81,717 U.K. Biobank participants — 56.4% of whom were female and 97% of whom were white — aged 42 to 78 years. The participants wore an accelerometer for 1 week and were followed over a median of almost 7 years.

Watts and colleagues found that increasing physical activity by 20 minutes every day was linked to hospitalization reductions that ranged from 3.8% (95% CI, 1.8-5.7) for colon polyps to 23% (95% CI, 17.1-28.9) for diabetes.

More specifically, they found that higher levels of physical activity were linked to lower risks for hospitalization for nine of the 25 conditions studied:

• colon polyps (HR = 0.96; 95% CI, 0.94-0.99);
• diabetes (HR = 0.79; 95% CI, 0.74-0.84);
• diverticular disease (HR = 0.94; 95% CI, 0.90-0.99);
• gallbladder disease (HR = 0.74; 95% CI, 0.69-0.79);
• iron deficiency anemia (HR = 0.91; 95% CI, 0.84-0.98);
• ischemic stroke (HR = 0.85; 95% CI, 0.76-0.95);
• pneumonia (HR = 0.83; 95% CI, 0.77-0.89);
• UTI (HR = 0.76; 95% CI, 0.69-0.84); and
• VTE (HR = 0.82; 95% CI, 0.75-0.9).

“Our findings reaffirmed the many benefits of physical activity and provided evidence that increasing MVPA levels may help to lower hospital burdens,” the researchers wrote. “Our results also highlighted the need for policy makers to implement effective policies to increase physical activity in the population and the important role of clinicians in encouraging patients to increase their physical activity.”

Watts and colleagues wrote that “future research should investigate the associations of higher-intensity physical activity with the magnitudes of disease risk and examine the role of different types of physical activity, such as muscle-strengthening exercises.”

“Identifying high-throughput biomarkers of physical activity will help investigations into the disease-specific mechanisms through which physical activity might be associated with disease risk and aid causal inference,” they wrote.