STUDY: Replacing 30 mins of sitting with activity lengthens life… Less than 6 hours sleep ups stroke risk

Less sitting, more moving tied to living longer

(CNN)Doing less sitting and more moving is tied to living longer, according to a new study.

Replacing 30 minutes per day of sedentary time with 30 minutes of physical activity at a light intensity was associated with a 17% lower risk of early death in a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology on Monday.

The study also found that replacing 30 minutes of sedentary time with 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise was associated with a 35% lower risk of early death.

“If you replace 30 minutes of sitting time with 30 minutes of light-intensity physical activity — so something just like a casual stroll down the hall — that still can lower your risk,” said Keith Diaz, a certified exercise physiologist and assistant professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, who was first author of the study.

“Obviously, it doesn’t lower your risk as much as exercise, or as much as moderate to vigorous physical activity, but it still can lower risk, and to us, that was somewhat of a new finding,” he said. “Any movement for any length of time is going to give you health benefit, and this is really shifting what we know about physical activity.”

Study: Less than six hours sleep per night increases risk for heart disease

Six hours: That’s the minimum amount of sleep per night you need to help your heart stay healthy, new research suggests.

The study found that chronic lack of sleep and poor sleep quality raise the odds of fatty plaque accumulation in arteries — a condition known as atherosclerosis, which increases the odds of heart attack and stroke.

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There are many ways to fight heart disease, including “pharmaceuticals, physical activity and diet,” said lead researcher Jose Ordovas. “But this study emphasizes we have to include sleep as one of the weapons we use to fight heart disease — a factor we are compromising every day.”

Ordovas is an investigator at the National Center for Cardiovascular Research in Madrid, Spain.

In the new research, his team used coronary ultrasound and CT scans to track the artery health of nearly 4,000 Spanish adults. The study participants, average age 46, did not have heart disease at the beginning of the study.

The study couldn’t prove cause and effect, but people who slept less than six hours a night were 27 percent more likely to have body-wide atherosclerosis than those who slept seven to eight hours a night, Ordovas and his colleagues reported.

Too much sleep wasn’t great for the heart, either. The study also found that women who slept more than eight hours a night had an increased risk of atherosclerosis.

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