Over the past several years, a number of studies in medicine and health science have found that sitting too much may pose a serious threat to physical health. Now, a study recently published in PLOS ONE (the Public Library of Science) suggests that:
Sitting too much may hurt not only your body, but your brain as well.
The conclusion that sitting too much is bad for the body should already be familiar to us. Sitting too much increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and premature death. As early as 2010, a U.S. research team looked at 14 years of health data from 120,000 middle-aged people and found that, compared with people who sat for no more than 3 hours a day, women who sat for more than 6 hours a day had a 37% higher death rate, while men had a 17% higher death rate. After analyzing people’s television-watching habits, an Australian research team calculated that people who watched 6 hours of TV a day (obviously, while sitting) died 5 years earlier than people who watched no TV.
What’s more, sitting too much is an independent factor affecting health and longevity; the benefits of exercise cannot completely offset it.
And this latest study found that sitting too much may also damage the cerebral cortex responsible for forming new memories.
In this study, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) recruited 35 participants between the ages of 45 and 75. They recorded the participants’ levels of physical activity, as well as the average number of hours they spent sitting each day during the previous week. Using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging scans, the researchers obtained detailed information about the participants’ medial temporal lobe (MTL). The MTL is a brain region involved in forming new memories. Thinning of the MTL may be an early sign of declining cognitive ability and dementia in middle-aged and older adults.
The researchers found that sitting too much was an important predictor of MTL thinning (in other words, the longer the reported sitting time, the thinner the MTL; the two were positively correlated). Even high levels of physical activity were not enough to offset the harmful effects of sitting too much. Of course, this was a correlational study, so the researchers still cannot determine whether the thinning of the brain structure or the sitting behavior came first.
Still, when we look at the research over the past several years on the relationship between sitting too much and health, it seems unlikely that a thinned brain region is what causes people to sit too much. Sitting too much hurts the brain—that seems like the more reasonable guess.
After every 20 minutes of working at the computer, get up and walk around for two or three minutes. This not only keeps you fit and helps you live longer; it may very well help keep your brain healthy too.
p.s.:
The study mentioned in the article:
Siddarth P, Burggren AC, Eyre HA, Small GW, Merrill DA (2018) Sedentary behavior associated with reduced medial temporal lobe thickness in middle-aged and older adults. PLOS ONE 13(4): e0195549. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0195549
p.p.s.:
A more aggressive way to prevent sitting too much is to set up a standing desk system and work standing up. That’s what I do myself—I switched to standing work and have kept it up for almost two years. The results are seriously great ^o^
Note
- This article in the “Psychology Bites of New Knowledge” series was a short piece of popular science and casual commentary written at the time to accompany related content from Zhichao Wei: Psychology Bites of New Knowledge. It was published on the now-closed Fatuan platform, and the original link no longer exists.
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