Covid symptoms & sedentary lifestyle: What’s the co-relation?

Can sedentary lifestyle kill you if you have covid? Learn what latest research says on this…

Monday, 19th April 2021

Lack of activity and exercises can lead to far more severe symptoms and even greater risk of mortality in patients suffering from the covid infection, a latest research conducted on about 50, 000 people have revealed. People who were leading a sedentary life for about 2 years prior to the covid pandemic were likely to get hospitalized, need Intensive Care and even die, reported the researchers on this Tuesday in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Covid disease’s severity deteriorates with physical inactivity and only the patients with an organ transplant history and those who are of an advanced age are at a greater risk when compared to the physically inactive patients of covid. Indeed, in comparison to the other modifiable covid disease risk factors like obesity, hypertension and smoking,, "physical inactivity was the strongest risk factor across all outcomes," concluded the research authors.

The pre-existing health issues most linked with severe infection of covid-19, are having diabetes, being a male, being of advanced age, having a history of cardiovascular disease and being obese.

But until now, sedentary lifestyle has been kept out of the list.

To study the link between severe covid infection, need to get hospitalized and the need to get ICU admissions and death of patients, the researchers attempted to compare the outcomes in the 48, 440 adult covid patients in the U.S. between the time span of January 2020 and October 2020.

The patients on whom the research was conducted had 47 years as their average age and 3 in 5 were female patients. Their body mass index stood at 31 on an average and that was just a little above obesity’s threshold.

About half of the patients weren’t suffering from any sort of underlying illnesses like cancer, kidney disease, heart disease, diabetes, chronic lung disease. About 20% of the patients had only one condition and 30% of the patients had two and more conditions.

All these patients had presented a report of the level of daily physical activity they are involved in at least thrice between the time periods of March 2018-March 2020 at the outpatient clinics.

Some 15% of the patients on whom research was conducted said that they are physically inactive (physical activity of 0-10 minutes per week), about 80% of the patients reported some sort of activity (physical activity of 11-149 minutes per week), and about 7% of the patients reported consistent physical activity (physical activity of 150+ minutes per week) as per the National Health Guidelines

After permitting the differences based on age, race and on underlying health conditions, Covid-19 patients with sedentary lifestyle were over twice as likely to get hospitalized when compared to those who are physically active.

Furthermore, such patients were 73% more likely to need the support of ICU and about 2.5 times more likely to succumb to the infection and lose their lives.

While the connection is strong statistically, the research - which is primarily observational in nature, as opposed to research based on clinical trial - cannot be considered as a direct proof that dearth of exercises caused the covid severity in the infected patients.

The News Talkie Bureau

Source:

Timesofindia Indiatimes