Watching TV for more than 5 hours a day … 44% higher risk of developing depression | Dong-A Ilbo

A study has shown that watching too much television increases the risk of developing dementia.

According to a recent study of 400,000 British people, people who watched TV for more than five hours a day had a 44% higher risk of developing dementia than those who watched less than an hour. It has been proven that watching TV for long periods of time is associated with an increased incidence of not only depression but also stroke and Parkinson’s disease.

The average amount of TV viewing time that is not harmful to brain health is about 3 hours a day.

According to a report by the British Daily Mail on the 18th (local time), researchers enrolled between 37 and 73 in the UK Biobank project (registering and monitoring medical data such as genes of around 500,000 people to study to do on major diseases). from 407,000 adults were analyzed. At the time of the first registration (2006-2010), no one was diagnosed with brain disease, and 40,000 people had brain imaging data.

During the 13-year follow-up period, 5,227 people developed depression, 6,822 suffered a stroke, and 2,308 were diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Those surveyed spent an average of 2.7 hours a day watching TV.

Those who watched between 3 and 5 hours of TV per day were found to have a 15% higher risk of developing dementia compared to those who watched less than 1 hour. If you watched TV for more than 5 hours a day, the risk of dementia was 44% higher, the risk of stroke was 12% higher, and the risk of Parkinson’s disease was 28% higher.

There was no difference in the amount of time spent using computers, whether it was long or short. The researchers reasoned that this was likely because computer use was associated with ‘more mentally challenging behaviour’.

Researchers at Tianjin Medical University in China, who conducted the study, also found that watching TV for more than five hours was associated with a reduction in gray matter and memory centers in the brain. Both are related to brain diseases.

However, this effect of watching TV has not been clearly understood. One theory is that low muscle activity and energy expenditure due to sedentary behavior leads to chronic inflammation and reduced blood flow to the brain.

The results of the research were published in the international academic journal ‘Journal of the American Medical Association’ (JAMDA).

Park Hae-sik, Donga.com reporter pistols@donga.com