Prolonged sitting and frailty a deadly combination

The Physical activity guidelines for Americans state that adults aged 18 to 64 and those aged 65 and older should aim to get at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity or seventy five minutes of vigorous intensity aerobic physical activity every week.

For adults who are unable to meet these guidelines it is recommended that "they should be as physically active as their abilities and conditions allows"
Ac cording to statics from 2016 National Health Interview Survey just 44.9 percent of older adults aged 65 to 74 met the physical activity guidelines last year.
What is more previous research has shown that older adults spend more than 9 hours of their day sitting down. The harms of sedentary behavior have been well documented.
For the last study, Dr. Olga Theou, of the department of medicine at Dalgousie University in Canada and colleagues set out to determine whether or not frailty plays a role in the increased death risk associated with sedentary behavior.

Higher death risk for frail adults:

The study included the data of 3,141 adults aged 50 and older who participated in the 2003-2004 and 2005-2006 United States National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

As per the survey, subjects were required to wear activity trackers during waking hours, and the researchers used these data to calculate how much time each adults spent sedentary.

The team also used a forty six items index to assess the frailty of each subject. Frailty is generally defined as an aging related process characterized by weakness unintended weight loss, slowness and fatigue.

Participants were followed up until 2011 or until their date of death.

Among adults whop scored highly on the frailty index and did not meet the physical activity guidelines, the researchers found that prolonged sitting was associated with an increased risk of death. This was not case for adults with low frailty who met exercise guidelines. "Thus among people who are inactive and vulnerable or frail sitting time increased mortality risk but those who are non frail or active sitting time does not affect the risk of mortality" say the researchers.

There were some limitations to their study for example the team had limited activity data on adults with higher frailty levels.

The Researcher explain " Our sample size was substantially reduced especially among the group with the highest level of frailty which made it necessary to merge frailty groups for some analysis and prevented us from isolating with severe frailty into one category"