Watching More TV Could Also Mean More Bodily Pain In The Long Run

How can watching TV affect people's health? More TV time could mean more bodily pain in the long run, researchers have found.

For their study, published in BMC Public Health, a team of researchers looked at data from 4,099 adults aged 35 to 65. The idea was to examine the relationship between how much TV they watched and the severity of their bodily pain over a 12-year period.

"Bodily pain is a common presentation in several chronic diseases, yet the influence of sedentary behavior, common in aging adults, is unclear," the researchers wrote. "Television-viewing (TV) time is a ubiquitous leisure-time sedentary behavior, with a potential contribution to the development of bodily pain."

The researchers looked at the participants' bodily pain (self-reported), TV time and diabetes status. They found not only that bodily pain worsened in severity with age, but also that increasing TV time was also "significantly associated" with increased body pain severity.

This was even more pronounced among those who had type 2 diabetes (T2D), who had the tendency to have both more pain and higher TV time compared to those without the condition.

"We found that increments in TV-viewing time over time predicted bodily pain severity," the study's principal researcher, Professor David Dunstan of Baker-Deakin Department of Lifestyle and Diabetes, said, as per the news release from the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute. "Even a one-hour increase in daily TV time was significantly associated with an increase in pain severity."

For instance, they found that an hour of increase in watching TV resulted in a worsening in body pain that's said to be equivalent to over two years of pain linked with normal aging, according to the institute. And for those with T2D, the impact of watching TV on the severity of bodily pain was particularly pronounced when the threshold increased above 2.5 hours per day.

"(T)he association of TV time with bodily pain severity at any particular time point was more pronounced in those with T2D than those without T2D," the researchers wrote.

Their findings, according to the researchers, are consistent with some previous evidence on the possibility of a link between pain conditions and sedentary behavior. It also aligns with the World Health Organization's (WHO) physical activity and sedentary behavior guidelines, which recommend more movement and less sedentary behaviors.

"Doing something as simple as reducing daily TV-watching time can have a profound effect on bodily pain trajectories that occur with aging, and also potentially be a non-pharmacologic intervention, or work hand-in-hand with other therapies, for chronic pain management," Dunstan said.