Too Much Screen Time Means Health Decline

Jan. 11, 2011— -- David Herbin goes to the gym every day after work and exercises like a demon for two hours. Then he comes home, flops on the couch and watches sports until bedtime.

Actually, now that the NFL playoffs are in full swing, he's glued to the tube even more than usual, often up to four hours per game even when there are multiple games on per day including the weekends. Though his wife Pegine admits his prolific TV viewing sometimes drives her crazy, she can't argue with the fact that the 57-year-old is still in great shape.

Or can she? A new investigation reported in today's Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC) begs to differ.

According to the study conducted by a group of international researchers, anyone who devotes more than four hours daily on screen-based entertainment such as TV, video games or surfing the web, ups their risk of heart attack and stroke by 113 percent and the risk of death by any cause by nearly 50 percent compared to those who spend less than two hours daily in screen play -- and this is regardless of whether or not they also work out.

The researchers surveyed more than 4,500 Scottish adults to find out how much time they spent parked in front of a TV, computer or gaming screen when not at work. (Scottish work and recreation habits jibe with the rest of the modern Western world, including the "American idle".) Then they analyzed their medical records for four years to find out how many of them succumbed to health problems or died during that time period.

Dedication to couch potato-style recreation translated into a greater incidence of poor health even after allowing for factors such as physical activity, age, sex and smoking.

"Assuming that leisure-time screen time is a representative indicator of overall sitting, our results lend support to the idea that prolonged sitting is linked to an increased risk for cardiovascular disease and premature mortality," notes the report's lead author, Emmanuel Stamatakis of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College in London. "Doing some exercise every day may not compensate for the damage done during very long periods of screen time."