Preventing the Sedentary Death Syndrome: A Call to Action From the AHA
Is there a “sedentary death syndrome,” in which an individual dies from diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, or myriad other causes related, at least in part, to too little physical activity? Many epidemiologists who study physical activity believe there is. They have concluded that physical inactivity contributes to 334,000 deaths annually in United States and to more than 5 million deaths worldwide. The World Health Organization lists physical inactivity as the fourth leading cause of non-communicable disease, behind only high blood pressure, smoking, and hyperglycemia. Moreover, the prevalence of physical inactivity worldwide is also growing to a point such that it is considered a pandemic.
Kraus and colleagues1 discuss The National Physical Activity Plan (NPAP) and provide a call to clinicians from the American Heart Association to be more active in reducing physical inactivity. NPAP was launched in 2010 to develop a multidisciplinary approach to increasing physical activity. There are multiple factors contributing to physical inactivity, such as the absence of safe places for walking and biking, a reduction in school recess time and physical education classes, and the replacement of physical activity during leisure time by “screen time.” NPAP has developed 231 recommendations in eight policy areas: business and industry; education; health care; mass media; parks, recreation, fitness, and sports; public health; transportation, land use, and community design; and volunteer and nonprofit agencies. The full plan can be reviewed on the NPAP website, where white papers for the eight focus areas are also available (www.physicalactivityplan.org).
One program advocated by NPAP and directly applicable to clinicians is the Exercise is Medicine (EIM) program, co-launched by the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Medical Association in 2007. EIM seeks to encourage health providers to assess patients’ physical activity levels and to provide either an exercise prescription to the patient or a referral to a qualified health and fitness professional. One of the themes advanced by EIM is that a physical activity history should be a “vital sign,” as important as blood pressure, body weight, and heart rate. It is difficult to recommend physical activity without knowing the patient’s present activity level.
Multiple strategies will be required to reverse the trend toward less physical activity and its deleterious effects on body weight, diabetes, blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and other maladies. The AHA recommends that clinicians contribute to this effort by taking an exercise history and by recommending that patients try to achieve the present national physical activity recommendations of 150 minutes weekly of activities such as brisk walking.Click on any of these tags to subscribe to Topic Alerts. Once subscribed, you can get a single, daily email any time PracticeUpdate publishes content on the topics that interest you.
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