The amount of sitting that risks damaging the heart.

Researchers have revealed that more than 10 hours sitting a day increases the chance of heart-related illnesses.

Modern life has brought us the types of jobs that require no physical activity and consequently many of us spend our working hours behind a desk.

But this lifestyle has put our health in jeopardy as obesity and heart disease are tied to both over-eating and inactivity.

Previous studies show that an inactive lifestyle not only contributes to heart disease but also other types of health problems, such as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes.

The new study looked at the number of hours sitting that a person can handle every day before it starts to harm their heart.

The researchers included sitting and lying down during the day as sedentary in their study.

The data was collected from 700,000 American patients with a mean age of 54.5 years over an eleven year period.

Their analysis suggests that the risk of heart-associated problems begins to increase in people who were inactive for 10 hours each day.

People who were sedentary on average for 12 hours a day had a 14 per cent higher chance of suffering from heart conditions compared to those were inactive for only 2.5 hours a day.

An example from everyday life shows how most people can be sedentary for 10 hours.

Office workers on average sit down for seven hours a day.

Then if we add the time for a lunch break and commuting  to work and then home, eating dinner, watching TV or playing video games, surfing the internet all together, it is easily more than 10 hours.

Nevertheless, they didn’t find any risk for the intermediate level of sedentary time which was categorised as 7.5 hours a day.

The study was published in the journal JAMA Cardiology (Pandey et al., 2016).

 Sitting image from Shutterstock