Small activities like daily chores can reduce the risk of heart attack, stroke, premature death: Study – Dainik Savera Times

Even small, incidental activities, including daily household chores, reduce the risk of heart attack, stroke and even premature death. This claim has been made on the basis of research by ‘The Lancet Public Health’. However, the duration and intensity of daily activity also matters. The research team from Britain and Australia, led by the University of Sydney, followed more than 25,000 adults in Britain for about 8 years during the study. Emmanuel Stamatakis (University of Sydney), senior author of the study, said: ‘From climbing stairs to mopping floors faster, in recent years we have understood that it is not just structural exercise that is good for our health, but also how we move. ‘Very little is known about how short periods of incidental activity bring us health benefits.’ Adults included in the study were ages 42–78, all of whom self-reported no participation in exercise or sports. The researchers used data from the British Biobank and machine learning to analyze their seven-day patterns of casual physical activity, covering up to 10 seconds of activity. They then compared these microscopic patterns of physical activity to the participants’ health records. For this, they monitored the participants for 8 years to understand what effect the duration and intensity of small physical activities has on health. The researchers found that almost all physical activity throughout the day (97 percent) was organized into multiple ‘slots’ (chunks), each of which was less than 10 minutes.

Duration and intensity of daily activity also matters

Matthew Ahmadi, a postdoctoral research fellow at Sydney, said: ‘The idea of ​​providing short periods of moderate to vigorous activity through activities of daily living makes physical activity more accessible to people who are willing to participate in structured exercise. Or incapable. But he said the duration and intensity of these activities also matter. They found that ‘moderate’ or ‘vigorous’ intense activity in these ‘slots’ was associated with a significantly reduced risk of major cardiovascular events such as heart attack or stroke and death from any cause. Additionally, they found that during a physical activity, people who increased their respiratory rate for at least 10 seconds per minute, or 15 percent of the duration of the activity, got the most benefits.