Being Fit Prevents Severe Covid-19 in a Dose-Dependent Manner
Half of Covid-19 hospitalizations could’ve been prevented by fostering a healthy lifestyle.
Mark Hamer, a professor of sport and exercise medicine, and his colleagues at UK institutions recently had their paper, “Lifestyle Risk Factors, Inflammatory Mechanisms, and COVID-19 Hospitalization: A Community-Based Cohort Study of 387,109 Adults in UK,” published in the Brain, Behavior, and Immunity journal.
This is the first study to investigate how much do health behaviours affect the risk of being hospitalized for Covid-19. And how many cases could have been averted if at-risk individuals fostered a healthier lifestyle.
Poor Lifestyle Score
The study recruited 387,109 people from the UK Biobank study, of whom 760 (0.2%) were hospitalized for Covid-19. Analyzing the health behaviours of these 760 patients, they found that a lifestyle score of ≥5 lead to 4.41-fold increased risk — or 4.41 times as likely — for hospitalization.
The poor lifestyle score is calculated based on:
- Smoking history (0=never; 1=past; 2=current).
- Physical activity (0=meeting guidelines; 1= active but below guideline; 2=sedentary). Guidelines were…
