Sedentary behaviour in older adults: investigating a new therapeutic paradigm

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Older age is associated with an increased risk of many diseases, poor physical function and frailty, cognitive decline and other forms of disability. Also, some groups such as South Asians have higher rate of disease. Research has shown that many of these factors are improved by higher levels of physical activity. However, little is known about the role of sedentary behaviour i.e., sitting time in older adults. Some research has started to show that reducing the time that you spend sitting can reduce the risk of many diseases and improve functional health. This research suggests that improvements in health may be gained by simply helping people to swop time spent sitting with time spent standing or in light-intensity walking. Older adults spend around 70% of their day sitting but little is currently known about whether reducing sitting time promotes health and wellbeing in older adults. This may be particularly relevant to older adults where fear of falls, joint pain, decreased physical function and other contraindications may limit motivation and ability to engage in much purposeful exercise. This grant is therefore going to focus on investigating the impact of sitting in older adults. The results of this research will inform larger studies and public health initiatives aimed at reducing sitting time in the future.Our research plan includes three work packages. In work package one, we will develop a method of estimating time spent sitting and in physical activity which hasn't been done before in older adults. This will be done in a laboratory where participants will complete a set of activities and we will measure the intensity of these activities. Another part of this work package is to use existing data that has been collected as part of the Health Survey for England. We will re-analyse this data to investigate how much sitting and physical activity older adults do, when and how often they do these behaviours (e.g., morning ,afternoon, evening, numbers of times in the day and how long for each time), and compare this to other age groups. We will also look at the relationship between sitting and physical activity with health and wellbeing in older adults. This data will be supplemented with data that we have collected within our department in a large population of older multi-ethnic adults. Work package two will develop a novel way of measuring sitting time which allows researchers to capture the location of where older adults spend the their time around the home/car environment and more accurately measure sitting time. This will involve a wrist worn device along with very small tags that can be attached to objects (such as chairs, tables, computers etc). We can then combine the information from both devices to measure time spent sitting but also the type of sitting behaviour and the location around the home (e.g., sofa in living room, computer in office, dining table etc). This will help researchers to develop ways to help people to reduce their sitting time. This novel method will be tested in a laboratory and also a small number of people will be asked to test it in their daily lives. Once they have done this we will ask them for feedback on perceptions of sedentary behaviour and these novel method of measuring sitting. Work package three will be a laboratory study to investigate the impact of sitting down all day (condition one), reducing sitting by standing every 30 minutes for a few minutes (condition two) and reducing sitting by slowly walking every 30 minutes for a few minutes (condition three). Participants will come into the laboratory and perform each of these conditions over a day (8am-5pm). During these conditions blood sugar, insulin, fats in the blood, mood and cognitive function will be measured. This work package will investigate how harmful sitting is for health and whether health can be improved by reducing sitting time either by standing or light walking or both.