Physical Activity Essential to Prolong Life Expectancy

Reporting that the global mortality burden of physical inactivity stands at over 5.3 million deaths annually, is similar to that of cigarette smoking  at 5 million deaths per year, I-Min Lee, from Harvard Medical School (Massachusetts, USA), and colleagues urge for initiatives to promote attainment of World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation of 150 minutes/week of moderate physical activity, such as brisk walking.  The team acquired burden of physical activity measures through several large cohort studies throughout the world using input from the Lancet Physical Activity Series Working Group, including data on prevalence of physical activity at baseline and incidence of death and relevant non-communicable disease. Those data were then used to determine the population attributable fraction (PAF) by country, by region, and globally for coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, breast cancer, colon cancer, and all-cause mortality. The researchers found that by eliminating inactivity globally, the world’s population would gain an estimated median 0.68 years in life expectancy (range 0.41 to 0.95), and that inactivity was tied to 5.3 million of 57 million deaths around the world in 2008. The researchers commented that complete, global elimination of inactivity was unlikely, but with a 10% or 25% reduction in global rates of inactivity, an estimated 533,000 and 1.3 million deaths, respectively, due to all-cause mortality would be prevented. Writing that: “Physical inactivity has a major health effect worldwide,” the study authors observe that: “Decrease in or removal of this unhealthy behaviour could improve health substantially.”