More TV Time May Mean Higher Diabetes Risk, Study Finds By Dennis Thompson

HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, April 2, 2015 (HealthDay News) -- If you're on the verge of developing diabetes, parking yourself in front of the TV might be one of the worst things you could do for your health, a new study suggests.

Every extra hour a person with prediabetes spends watching TV each day raises their risk of developing full-blown type 2 diabetes by 3.4 percent, according to research published April 1 in the journal Diabetologia.

The study couldn't prove cause-and-effect. But the increased risk associated with being a couch potato occurred whether or not the study participants were taking diabetes drugs, or whether or not they were eating healthy diets and exercising, the researchers found.

However, people who tried to prevent diabetes through healthy lifestyle changes did end up watching less television over time, the study found.

The results are troubling, given the epidemic of obesity that continues to plague the United States, said senior study author Andrea Kriska, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public Health.

"As time goes on and people are getting less active and more overweight, the number of people at risk for diabetes is increasing by leaps and bounds. It's not a rare group of people" who will be exposed to increased diabetes risk due to their sedentary habits, Kriska said.

The new study relies on data from participants in the Diabetes Prevention Program, a federally funded study published in 2002. That study included slightly more than 3,200 overweight U.S. adults between 1996 and 1999. The study's goal was to delay or prevent type 2 diabetes in high-risk patients, either with the diabetes drug metformin or via lifestyle changes.

Eating right and engaging in physical activity proved the most successful route, resulting in a 58 percent decrease in the development of diabetes compared to doing nothing. By comparison, metformin caused only a 31 percent decrease in diabetes development, Kriska said.

Since they'd proven that physical activity can forestall diabetes, researchers decided to take the opposite tack and explore whether sitting around for extended periods can raise diabetes risk, said study author Bonny Rockette-Wagner, director of physical activity assessment at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public Health.