|
 Researchers found that people with the sit-stand desks spent about
60 minutes more on their feet during the workday and 66 fewer
minutes sitting down than their colleagues with ordinary desks.
“I wasn’t surprised that they stood more as that is the sole purpose
of the desk, but I was surprised by how much more they stood,
especially after having the sit-stand desks for well over a year,”
said lead study author Lucas Carr, a researcher at the University of
Iowa in Iowa City.
“These findings suggest that the novelty of these desks doesn’t wear
off right away, but rather that employees continue to use them
long-term,” Carr added by email.
For the study, published in the American Journal of Preventive
Medicine, researchers used motion trackers on 69 middle-aged, mostly
female employees of a company in the Midwest over five days to see
how much time they spent sitting, standing and walking around the
office.
The people using sit-stand workstations had typically had them for
an average of nearly two years and the workers using traditional
desks had been using the same one for more than six years.
With adjustable desks, in addition to standing more, workers
appeared to walk more and expend more energy on physical activity
over the course of the day, but the differences were so small they
might have been due only to chance.
Plenty of research has shown the benefits of physical activity, and
the potential health hazards of an extremely sedentary lifestyle.
Carr and colleagues designed the current study to see if sit-stand
desks might be linked to lasting changes in how many hours workers
spent in their chairs.
While they did find the sit-stand desks linked to less sedentary
time, they also found that most of the extra time people spent out
of their seats was devoted standing still.
The study team looked as well at whether the extra standing and
walking translated into better health by measuring markers linked to
heart disease and diabetes like blood fats, body weight and waist
circumference. There were no differences based on desk type,
although more steps taken during the day was linked to slightly
lower blood pressure.
[to top of second column] |
A shortcoming of the study, the authors acknowledge, is its small
size and reliance on a group of predominantly middle-aged,
overweight white women at a single workplace.
Still, as a growing body of research now links sedentary time to a
number of bad health outcomes, the current findings offer more
evidence that modifications to the modern work space might
effectively limit the time workers spend sitting down, said Bethany
Barone Gibbs, a researcher in health and physical activity at the
University of Pittsburgh.
Even without sit-stand desks, there are still plenty of things
workers can do to decrease sedentary time during the day, noted Dr.
Francisco Lopez-Jiminez, a cardiology researcher at the Mayo Clinic
in Rochester, Minnesota, who wasn’t involved in the study.
“There are many ways to stand at work and to be active at work, and
many of those things don’t require any special equipment,” Lopez-Jiminez
said by email. “Most buildings have stairs to use, long hallways to
walk and people can be creative adapting their desk with simple ways
to raise the monitor.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1KZ7qe8 American Journal of Preventive
Medicine, online October 1, 2015.
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
