Sleeping and sitting for long increases death risk - study

Sleeping more than nine hours a night and sitting too much during the day could be a hazardous combination, particularly when added to a lack of exercise, new findings from a study by the Australian nonprofit Sax Institute says, according to a press release by the body.

It said new findings emerging from its 45 and Up Study show that a person with those behaviours is more than four times as likely to die early as a person without them.

“Too much sitting equates to more than 7 hours a day and too little exercise is defined as less than 150 minutes a week”, the press release explains.

In the study Traditional and Emerging Lifestyle Risk Behaviors and All-Cause Mortality in Middle-Aged and Older Adults: Evidence from a Large Population-Based Australian Cohort in the journal PLOS Medicine, researchers from the University of Sydney analysed health behaviours of more than 230,000 participants of the 45 and Up Study.

They looked at lifestyle behaviours known to increase the risk of death and disease – smoking, high alcohol intake, poor diet and physical inactiveness – and added excess sitting time and too little or too much sleep to the equation. They then examined different combinations of all of these risk factors to see which groupings had the most impact on a person’s risk of dying prematurely from any cause.

As well as this new evidence, the researchers also found another problematic triple threat: smoking, high alcohol intake and lack of sleep – less than seven hours a night – is also linked to a more than four times greater risk of early death. And several other combinations led to more than double the risk of early death: physical inactivity and too much sleep, physical inactivity and too much sitting, and smoking and high alcohol intake.