All-cause mortality attributable to sitting time and physical inactivity in chilean adults

© The Author(s) 2023. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.Background: Evidence on all-cause mortality attributable to joint sitting time and physical inactivity is lacking. In this study, we estimated the proportion and number of deaths attributable to sitting time and physical inactivity in Chilean adults. Methods: A sample of 5834 adults aged 20-96 years from a 2016-2017 Chilean National Health Survey was included to describe the prevalence of 16 joint categories of sitting time and physical activity. Relative risks for the joint association of sitting time and physical inactivity were obtained from a meta-analysis of individual participant data. We retrieved the number of deaths in adults ≥ 20 years in 2019 from the Chilean Ministry of Health. Results: Participants with high sitting time (> 8 h/day) and low physical activity (35.5 MET-hour/week and maintaining sitting time could prevent approximately 10,477 deaths or 9.5% of all deaths. Reducing sitting time to < 4 h/day and maintaining physical activity would not reduce the number of deaths (-3.4% or 38 deaths). Conclusion: Reducing sitting time may be ancillary for preventing mortality. Therefore, increasing physical activity should be the primary focus of interventions and policies in Chile.The present study received financial support from Vicerrectoría de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación, Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH), Proyecto DICYT, grant # 032287DF.