Pushing a
shopping cart or a vacuum doesn’t take a lot of effort, but enough of this sort
of light physical activity every day can help people with or at risk of knee
arthritis avoid developing disabilities as they age, according to a new Northwestern
Medicine® study.
It is known that the more time people
spend in moderate or vigorous activities, the less likely they are to develop
disability, but this is the first study to show that spending more time in
light activities can help prevent disability, too.
“Our findings provide encouragement for
adults who may not be candidates to increase physical activity intensity due to
health limitations,” said Dorothy Dunlop, professor of medicine at Northwestern
University Feinberg School of Medicine and lead author of the study. “Even
among those who did almost no moderate activity, the more light activity they
did, the less likely they were to develop disability.”
Results of the study were published April
29, 2014 in the British Medical Journal.
The scientists identified a group of
almost 1,700 adults, ages 45 to 79, from the Osteoarthritis Initiative study
who were free of disability but were at elevated risk for developing it because
they had knee osteoarthritis or other risk factors for knee osteoarthritis, such
as obesity.
Knee osteoarthritis commonly leads to
disability, preventing people from engaging in activities essential to
independent living and quality of life, such as dressing, bathing, walking
across a room or making telephone calls, managing money and grocery shopping.
Two-thirds of obese adults are expected to develop knee osteoarthritis during
their lifetime.
To track the amount and intensity of
physical activity these at-risk people engaged in every day, scientists had
them wear an accelerometer during waking hours for about a week. The device is
worn around the hip and measures the intensity of movement. The data collected
reveals how much time is spent in vigorous, moderate or light activities.
Two years after collecting the results
from the accelerometer, participants were surveyed and asked about the
development of disabilities. As expected, more time spent in moderate or
vigorous activity was associated with lower reports of disabilities, but
researchers were pleased to find that greater time spent in light intensity
activities also was related to fewer disabilities, even after accounting for
time spent in moderate activities.
Those who spent more than four hours per
day doing light physical activity had more than a 30 percent reduction in the
risk for developing disability compared to those spending only three hours a
day in light activity (the least average number of hours collected in the study).
The findings controlled for time spent in
moderate or vigorous physical activity and other predictors of disability, both
demographic and health factors.
“We
were delighted to see that more time spent during the day, simply moving your
body, even at a light intensity, may reduce disability,” Dunlop said. “Now
people with health problems or physical limitations, who cannot increase the
intensity of their activity, have a starting place in the effort to stay
independent.”
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