Tuesday, 16 August 2011

Exercise and Immortality

I was reading an article by Fergus Walsh on the BBC about a study linking watching TV to life expectancy. Fairly sensible looking article, was only skimming it. Came across this excellent sentence though:
In the Lancet online, they suggest that 15 minutes of physical activity per day can reduce a person's risk of death by 14% and increase life expectancy by three years compared with inactive people.
Expect new adverts from gyms - join our gym and you could become immortal!

Of course, somewhere a time-frame is missing. Presumably the 14% reduction is within a given time frame. The abstract of the article doesn't mention a time-frame. Definitely something wrong here though.
Posted by Anthony at 12:06
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1 comment:

  1. Anthony16 August 2011 at 14:02

    You're obviously right Ash but as I said the time-frame is missing. Without it the risk of death is 100% for both groups - everyone in both groups will die at some point.

    I'm sure the research was well done but the abstract and the reporting are missing a crucial piece of data it would seem. I just found it amusing because without the time-frame, the suggestion is that exercise could make you immortal.

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