Replacing sitting with as little as a few minutes of moderate exercise a day tangibly improves heart health, according to new research from UCL and the University of Sydney.
The study, supported by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and published in the European Heart Journal, is of the first to assess how different movement patterns throughout the 24-hour day are linked to heart health.
In this study, researchers at UCL analyzed data from six studies, encompassing 15,246 people from five countries, to see how movement behavior across the day is associated with heart health, as measured by six common indicators. Each participant used a wearable device on their thigh to measure their activity throughout the 24-hour day and had their heart health measured.
The researchers identified a hierarchy of behaviors that make up a typical 24-hour day, with time spent doing moderate-vigorous activity providing the most benefit to heart health, followed by light activity, standing and sleeping compared with the adverse impact of sedentary behaviour.
The team modelled what would happen if an individual changed various amounts of one behavior for another each day for a week, in order to estimate the effect on heart health for each scenario. When replacing sedentary behavior, as little as five minutes of moderate-vigorous activity had a noticeable effect on heart health.
For a 54-year-old woman with an average BMI of 26.5, for example, a 30-minute change translated into a 0.64 decrease in BMI, which is a difference of 2.4%. Replacing 30 minutes of daily sitting or lying time with moderate or vigorous exercise could also translate into a 2.5 cm (2.7%) decrease in waist circumference or a 1.33 mmol/mol (3.6%) decrease in glycated haemoglobin.
Those who are least active were also found to gain the greatest benefit from changing from sedentary behaviors to more active ones.