Watching more TV every day is linked to worse bodily pain over time. We’re not just talking about Love is Blind.
Bad news for anyone who’s spent the last week binge-watching the latest season of White Lotus.
Which, according to The Back Page’s twitter feed, is probably every person in Australia.
According to a new study published in BMC Public Health, those who spend more hours in front of the TV are more likely to experience greater bodily pain over time (an unfortunate explanation for this correspondent’s recent bout of back pain).
Melbourne researchers examined data from around 4100 adults aged 35 to 65 to establish how watching TV, one of the most common sedentary pastimes, might contribute to developing general body pain, and whether it made this pain more severe.
They found that increasing TV-watching by an hour led to participants reporting an increase in their bodily pain by 0.69 units, which researchers worked out to be the equivalent of more than two years of pain caused by natural ageing.
The self-reported scores were based on a pain scale from 0 to 100, where lower scores meant higher levels of pain (surely it should be the other way around).
The study also showed a stronger association between TV-watching and bodily pain for those with type 2 diabetes.
Participants living with diabetes watched TV for an average of 2.5 hours a day, compared to just over 1.5 for those without the condition.
In addition, their reported pain scores were around 10 points lower than the scores from the non-diabetes cohort, with particularly severe increases in pain for those who watched more than 2.5 hours of TV a day.
The study’s authors say their findings corroborate existing evidence on the potentially detrimental effect of excessive sedentary behaviour on bodily pain in middle-aged and older adults.
“Our findings suggest that the magnitude of the detrimental relationships of higher volumes of TV time with bodily pain severity at any given time point is different in those with and without T2D.
“While increasing physical activity is a mainstay of the prevention and management of chronic health problems, these new findings highlight the potential of reducing sedentary behaviours in this context,” they concluded.
So maybe consider throwing in a jumping jack or two when season 3 comes around.
If you see anything binge-worthy, share it with penny@medicalrepublic.com.au.
