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Non-exercise physical activity and survival: English longitudinal study of ageing
journal contribution
posted on 2015-10-30, 14:28 authored by Mark Hamer, Cesar de Oliveira, Panayotes DemakakosBackground: The activity patterns of older adults include more light/mild-intensity or “nonexercise”
activity and less moderate- to vigorous-intensity activity. The health benefits of this type of
activity pattern remain unclear.
Purpose: To examine dose–response associations between physical activity and survival using
time-varying analysis to understand the importance of “non-exercise” activity for survival in older
adults.
Methods: Participants (N¼10,426) were drawn from The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, a
representative sample of men and women aged Z50 years living in England. Participant data were
linked with death records from the National Health Service registries from 2002 to 2011. Analyses
were conducted in 2013. Cox proportional hazards models were used to estimate the risk of death
according to time-varying estimates of physical activity.
Results: Over an average follow-up of 7.8 years (median follow-up, 8.5 years), there were 1,896
deaths. In models adjusted for comorbidities, psychosocial factors, smoking, and obesity, there was a
dose–response association between time-varying physical activity and mortality, with the greatest
survival benefit in vigorously active participants. However, participating in mild (“non-exercise”)-
intensity physical activity was also associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality (hazard ratio
[HR]¼0.76, 95% CI¼0.69, 0.83); cardiovascular mortality (HR¼0.74, 95% CI¼0.64, 0.85); and
death by other causes (HR¼0.67, 95% CI¼0.58, 0.78). Time-varying models produced stronger,
more robust estimates than models using a single measurement of physical activity at baseline.
Conclusions: Older adults gain health benefits from participating in regular “non-exercise”
physical activity, although the greatest benefits are observed for more vigorous activity.
Funding
Funding was provided by the National Institute on Aging in the U.S. (grant nos. 2RO1AG7644-01A1 and 2RO1AG017644) and a consortium of United Kingdom government departments coordinated by the Office for National Statistics. MH is supported by the British Heart Foundation (RE/10/005/28296).
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
American Journal of Preventive MedicineCitation
HAMER, M., DE OLIVEIRA, C. and DEMAKAKOS, P., 2014. Non-exercise physical activity and survival: English longitudinal study of ageing. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 47(4), pp. 452–460.Publisher
© The Authors. The American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc.Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2014Notes
Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.ISSN
1873-2607Publisher version
Language
- en