Longer TV time increases risk of blood clot death

People who watch television for five hours or more a day have more than double the risk to die of a blood clot in the lung compared to those who watch half as much TV, a large Japanese study suggests.

According to the National Library of Medicine, there are more than 200,000 cases of pulmonary embolism in the US each year that usually begins as a blood clot in the leg that travels to the lung. It can permanently damage lung tissue, other organs, or cause death, but many people who have it have no symptoms.

Study co-author Dr. Hiroyasu Iso, professor of public health at Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, said that pulmonary embolism is less common in Japan than in Western countriesbut Japanese people are becoming increasingly sedentary.

Iso said that they were surprised to find that watching television has a stronger effect in the study compared to advancing age, history of hypertension and diabetes mellitus, or body mass index. They speculate that leg immobility while watching increases the risk of fatal pulmonary embolism.

Between 1988 and 1990 Iso and colleagues asked more than 85,000 adults 40 to 79 years old in Japan how many hours they spent watching TV, then followed them for the next 19 years looking for deaths from pulmonary embolism. They also collected information on obesity, diabetes, cigarette smoking and high blood pressure, and tried to rule these factors out in the relationship between TV and blood clots.

Only 59 people in the sample died of pulmonary embolism, but compared to people who watched two and a half hours of TV or less per day, those who watched five or more hours were 2.5 times as likely to die of a clot.Risk of pulmonary embolism death increased by 40% for each additional two hours of daily TV watching, they found.

“Time spent watching TV is a pretty reliable way to measure how much time people spend sedentary, or inactive,” said Dr. Christopher Kabrhel, an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston who was not part of the new study. “If being sedentary puts you at risk for pulmonary embolism, and I believe it does, then it likely also puts you at risk of death from pulmonary embolism, as this study showed.”

After TV watching time, obesity was the next most important factor predicting risk of death from pulmonary embolism, the authors found.

“Nowadays, with online video streaming, the term ‘binge-watching’ to describe viewing multiple episodes of television programs in one sitting has become popular,” lead author Dr. Toru Shirakawa, a research fellow in public health at Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, wrote.

Travelers on long plane flights and people watching TV for long periods of time can stand up, stretch, walk around, or tense and relax their leg muscles for five minutes to reduce the risk of blood clots, they wrote.

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Category: Features, Health alert