Health Confirmed: He Who Sits the Most Dies the Soonest

But while the death risk was much lower for anyone who exercised five hours a week or more, it still rose as these active people sat longer.

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Confirmed: He Who Sits the Most Dies the Soonest

Another study shows that sitting is really, really, really bad for your health. Please, just get a standup desk!

www.theatlantic.com

linguician said:

This is the usual math-illiterate popular hype. Looking at the associated scholarly article the main finding is that the "all-cause mortality hazard ratio" for those who sat 4-8 hours a day is 1.02, and 1.40 for those who sit 11+ hours a day. I will trust that they say they accounted for other confounding factors like physical activity (though it's hard to imagine a marathon runner who sat 11 hours a day). The studied population was aged 45 and over. So, there is a 40% increased likelihood of death in those who sat for 11+ hours a day, vs 4-8. That's not the same as a 40% chance of dying.
T̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶-̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶h̶a̶z̶a̶r̶d̶ ̶r̶a̶t̶i̶o̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶1̶0̶0̶0̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶d̶y̶i̶n̶g̶.̶ ̶S̶o̶,̶ ̶1̶.̶0̶2̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶l̶y̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶a̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶s̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶d̶y̶i̶n̶g̶.̶ ̶1̶.̶4̶0̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶1̶.̶4̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶a̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶s̶a̶n̶d̶,̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶0̶.̶0̶4̶%̶ ̶i̶n̶c̶r̶e̶a̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶d̶e̶a̶t̶h̶.̶ (Oops, see note below. Hat tip to greenthoughts.)
More detail: In the US, the death rate for 45-54 year olds in 2004 was 423.1 per 100,000, or 0.423%. (It's lower for younger people over 1 year old, and higher for older people. For those 25-34 year old Redditors, it's 100.5 per 100,000, or almost exactly my erroneous orignal 0.1%. Cool! For 15-24 year olds it is only 0.08%)
40% more likely than 0.423% (age 45-54) is an increased death rate of 0.169%. (Back to 0.04% for 25-34 year olds.) So there's an estimate of the order of magnitude of the increased likelihood of death. It's still small for most of us, but age dependent. For those 85+, the US death rate is almost 14%. 40% more than that is 19.6%.. almost 6% higher. There's a difference worth noting.
From what I've seen of people installing standing desks in my office, you could be more likely to give yourself a concussion adjusting the desk height than you are to prevent your death.
I'm sure (some) extreme sports have a higher increase in all-cause mortality than sitting all day.
You should get up, move around, eat right, get exercise and all that, but you shouldn't stress over sitting on your ass and not having a standing desk unless you have a lot of other risk factors. 0.04% to 0.169% is not a huge increase.
That's why we didn't have piles of dead office workers in the streets as we moved away from manufacturing and farm labor a hundred years ago.
Edit: Adding a link to Cornell Ergonomics Lab (hat tip to harlows_monkeys), with an actual useful discussion of the ergonomics of the situation. Turns out standing desks may not be so great after all if you just stand there motionless all day. I guess there's a lot of history with factory line workers standing all day.
Edit: greenthoughts clarified the meaning of hazard ratio. I was lead astray by a quick search on the internet. So, the absolute risk is not something we have. However we can estimate the magnitude of it by using overall death rates, as above.

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Confirmed

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Accname said:

But how did they test it? Did they watch those 200'000 guys 24/7 for 50 years until the majority of them died?
Did they only count those who died to old age or illness?
I dont know, seems hard to make this sound believable.

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Sevion said:

This is nothing to worry about unless you're like 80 years old. In which case you shouldn't be worrying about death anyways.

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tom_mai78101 said:

I see that you brought up an interesting point of view. I'll read some more insights after midnight snacks.

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Slapshot136 said:

I think of it in reverse.. younger people are less likely to be preoccupied with death, while older people think about it more and have more health issues, and they need to get their will done, their funeral arranged, etc.

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Varine said:

I already have that situated. Life insurance FTW.

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Varine said:

I already have that situated. Life insurance FTW.

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Jindo said:

You should consider cross referencing your science related articles with Reddit before linking to them (or just research some of the points for a few minutes), I've been seeing more and more articles appearing on the front page about cancer or AIDS "breakthroughs" (or cures for them and other currently incurable diseases), imminent meteors and shady looking studies and more often than not these kinds of articles are over-exaggerated, sensationalised garbage that we really shouldn't be drawing attention to as legitimate breaking news.

That said, most of the articles you find are fine and it's great that you take the time to find them, I think just a little research on the more science-related ones could really improve the content people are exposed to if they see the front page.

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