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PASADENA, Calif. A Kaiser Permanente study of nearly 50,000 people with COVID-19 suggested that regular physical activity provided strong protection from hospitalization, intensive care unit admission, and death. Even exercising inconsistently lowered the odds for severe COVID-19 outcomes when compared to people who were not active at all.
The study, led by investigators in Kaiser Permanente Southern California, was published in the
British Journal of Sports Medicine. This is a wake-up call for the importance of healthy lifestyles and especially physical activity, said Robert E. Sallis, MD, a family and sports medicine physician at the Kaiser Permanente Fontana Medical Center. Kaiser Permanente s motivation is to keep people healthy, and this study truly shows how important that is during this pandemic and beyond. People who regularly exercise had the best chance of beating COVID-19, while people who were inactive did much worse.
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VIDEO: The burden of cancer varies across countries. In a recent study, researchers summarize the changing trends of the cancer burden worldwide and compare it with the cancer data of China view more
Credit: Chinese Medical Journal
Cancer is one of the top causes of death worldwide. The cancer burden is related not only to genetic predisposition, but also to environmental pollution and socioeconomic factors such as lifestyle. Consequently, the burden of this disease is not uniform across all countries. In fact, the public health of China, a country known for the rapid change in its development status in the last few decades, has undergone a paradigm shift with respect to cancer incidence and mortality.
As Europe experienced its enormous second wave of the COVID-19 disease, researchers noticed the mortality rate was much lower than during the first wave. This inspired some to study and quantify the mortality rate on a country-by-country basis to determine how much the rate decreased. In Chaos, they introduce methods to study the progression of COVID-19 cases to deaths during the different waves; their methods involve applied mathematics, specifically nonlinear dynamics, and time series analysis.
Mathematical analysis of COVID mortality rates in the US and Europe shows that second-wave mortality was often greatly reduced - particularly in wealthier European countries and the northeast of the US.
Credit: Getty images
SLOW walkers are almost four times more likely to die from COVID-19, and have over twice the risk of contracting a severe version of the virus, according to a team of researchers from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Leicester Biomedical Research Centre led by Professor Tom Yates at the University of Leicester. The study of 412,596 middle-aged UK Biobank participants examined the relative association of body mass index (BMI) and self-reported walking pace with the risk of contracting severe COVID-19 and COVID-19 mortality.
The analysis found slow walkers of a normal weight to be almost 2.5 times more likely to develop severe COVID-19 and 3.75 times more likely to die from the virus than normal weight fast walkers. (1)