Put potatoes on! If you sit down, it doubles the risk of dying from COVID-19, according to new research.
A study on the effect of exercise on 48,440 patients diagnosed from 1 January to 21 October 2020 concluded that inactivity is the third biggest risk factor for serious illnesses – worse than heart disease, diabetes or smoking, reports eurekalert.org .
The results, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found that patients with coronavirus who were constantly inactive were 1.73 times more likely to be admitted to the ICU than those who were constantly active.
The chance of death was even higher – with consistently inactive patients dying 2.49 times more due to COVID-19 compared to patients who were constantly active.
“This is a wake-up call for the importance of a healthy lifestyle and especially physical activity,” said Dr. Robert Sallis, a physician at the Kaiser Permanent Fontana Medical Center, said.
“The motivation of Kaiser Permanente is to keep people healthy, and this study really shows how important it is during this pandemic and beyond. “People who exercise regularly have the best chance of beating COVID-19, while people who were inactive did much worse,” he added.
The study, led by researchers from Kaiser Permanente Southern California, also found that even patients who were inconsistently active were less likely to become seriously ill, suggesting that any activity is beneficial.
To reach their conclusions, researchers collected data on how many days the studied had moderate to strenuous exercise each week and on average how many minutes they exercised at that level.
The subjects – 62 percent of whom were female and whose average age was 47 – reflect the diverse racial composition of the Southern California population.
Of the total, 6.4 per cent were continuously active and 14.4 per cent consistently inactive, while the rest fell into the category of inconsistently active.
Among all the patients, 8.6 percent were admitted to the hospital, 2.4 percent were admitted to the ICU and 1.6 percent died.
“What surprised me most about this study was the strength of the link between inactivity and poor outcomes of COVID-19,” said co-author Deborah Rohm Young, PhD, of the Kaiser Permanente Research and Evaluation Department in South -California said.
“Even after we included variables such as obesity and smoking in the analysis, we still saw that inactivity is strongly associated with much higher chance of hospitalization, ICU admission and death compared to moderate physical activity or any activity,” he said. she added.
Sallis offered a simple prescription.
“Run 30 minutes a day, five days a week at a moderate pace and it will give you a tremendous protective effect against COVID-19,” he said.
“I continue to believe that exercise is medicine that everyone should use – especially in this era of COVID-19.”
