The researchers focused on two categories of health outcomes: cardiovascular, including coronary heart disease, heart failure and stroke; and orthostatic circulatory disorders, including orthostatic hypotension (blood pressure drops when standing or sitting), varicose veins, chronic venous insufficiency (the veins in your legs do not transport blood back to your heart), and venous ulcers. The reason for this second category is that sitting and standing for long periods of time can pose risks for developing circulatory disorders.
The researchers found that when participants' total stationary time (sitting and standing) exceeded 12 hours per day, the risk of orthostatic circulatory diseases increased by 22 percent per additional hour, while the risk of cardiovascular disease increased by 13 percent per additional hour. hour rose.
For just sitting, the risks increased every hour after 10 hours: for orthostatic circulatory diseases, the risk increased by 26 percent every hour after 10 hours, and the risk of cardiovascular disease by 15 percent. When standing, the risk of orthostatic circulatory disorders increased after just two hours, increasing by 11 percent every 30 minutes after two hours of standing. But standing did not affect cardiovascular disease at any time.
“Unlike sitting time, spending more time standing was not associated with higher rates of cardiovascular disease [cardiovascular disease] risk. Overall, there was no association between a higher or lower risk of cardiovascular disease over the entire duration of standing,” the authors report.
On the other hand, keeping sitting time under 10 hours and standing time under two hours was linked to a weak protective effect against orthostatic circulatory diseases: a day of nine hours of sitting and 1.5 hours of standing (for a total of 11.5 hours of standing time). ) reduced the risk of orthostatic circulatory disorders by a few percentage points, the study found.
In other words, as long as you can keep your total down time under 12 hours, you can use a little standing time to keep your sitting time under 10 hours and avoid increasing both cardiovascular and orthostatic risks, according to the data.
Consistent finding
It's a very detailed formula for reducing the health risks of long days in the office, but is it set in stone? Probably not. For starters, it's just one study that needs to be replicated in a different population. Also, the study did not look at specifics of standing and sitting times at work versus leisure, let alone the use of standing desks in particular. The study also based estimates of people's sitting, standing, and total down time on just four days of activity monitoring, which may or may not have been consistent over the average follow-up period of nearly seven years.
