The researchers focused on two categories of health outcomes. One is cardiovascular, which covers coronary heart disease, heart failure, and stroke. These include orthostatic hypotension (blood pressure drops when you stand or sit), varicose veins, chronic venous insufficiency (the veins in your legs don’t return blood to your heart), and orthostatic circulatory disease events such as venous ulcers. The reason for this second category is that sitting or standing for long periods of time can put you at risk for developmental problems. cardiovascular disease.
Researchers found that when participants spent more than 12 hours of total stationary time (sitting and standing) per day, their risk of orthostatic cardiovascular disease increased by 22 percent per hour; They found that the risk of vascular disease increased by 13 percent per hour.
If you were just sitting, your risk increased every hour after 10 hours. For orthostatic cardiovascular disease, the risk increased by 26% for each hour after 10 hours, and the risk for cardiovascular disease increased by 15%. When standing, the risk of orthostatic cardiovascular disease increased in just two hours, increasing by 11% for every 30 minutes of standing for two hours. However, standing had no effect on cardiovascular disease at any time.
“In contrast to sitting time, increased standing time was not associated with increased CVD.” [cardiovascular disease] risk. Overall, we found no association between higher and lower CVD risk across the range of duration of standing,” the authors report.
On the other hand, keeping sitting time less than 10 hours and standing time less than 2 hours was associated with a weak protective effect against orthostatic cardiovascular disease. That means 9 hours of sitting time and 1.5 hours of standing time per day (11.5 hours of total stationary time). ) Studies have found that the risk of orthostatic cardiovascular disease is reduced by several percentage points.
In other words, the data shows that if you can keep your total stationary time to less than 12 hours, you can use some standing time to keep your sitting time to less than 10 hours, and you can reduce both cardiovascular disease and orthostasis. You can avoid increased risk.
consistent findings
It’s a very detailed formula for mitigating the health risks of long hours at the office, but is it set in stone? Probably not. First, this is just one study that needs to be replicated in another population. Additionally, the study did not specifically examine work standing time and leisure time standing and sitting time, let alone the use of standing desks. The study also based estimates of people’s sitting, standing, and total stationary time based on just four days of activity monitoring, which may have been consistent over an average follow-up period of nearly seven years. , maybe it wasn’t.
