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Week 8 Task
THE IMPACT OF THE LACK OF EXCERCISE IN THE INCREASING OF CHRONIC DISEASES AND MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS
Would you believe me if I told you that a sedentary lifestyle can cause many diseases and not just cardiovascular ones? Putting bad habits over the necessity for physical activity has resulted in lack of exercise being the biggest cause of chronic diseases increasing exponentially (Anderson and Durstine, 2019). These conditions include heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. This health crisis affects all age groups, genders and ethnicities. To promote a healthy lifestyle and reduce cardiovascular diseases, it is helpful to recognize the profound impact exercise has on disease prevention and health care because inactivity significantly increases the risk of chronic cardiovascular conditions, heightens the mortality rates of these diseases and aggravates mental health disorders.
Sedentary lifestyle is associated with the increase on the risk of chronic and cardiovascular diseases such as diabetes. According to a study by Korean Journal of Family medicine, "A sedentary lifestyle increases all-cause mortality and the risks for cardiovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus and hypertension", (Park, Moon, Kim, Kong and Oh, 2020). It is time to act as a society and work for a conductive environment to care of the body. Inactivity is already harmful to health; it also aggravates other conditions and creates some more serios ones. As if that was not enough, this lack of physical activity can increase the number of deaths caused by the mentioned diseases.
Lack of exercise heighten the mortality rates in patients of cardiovascular and other chronic diseases such as cancer. According to an article by European Heart Journal, during 2015, in the USA, 633 842 deaths were caused by heart disease, while 595 930 deaths were because of cancer. Worldwide, in 2015, 17.7 million deaths were due to cardiovascular diseases, while 8.8 million were due to cancer. (Sturgeon, Deng, Bluethmann, Zhou, Trifiletti, Jiang, Kelly and Zaorsky, 2019). We don't think about this numbers enough, we are talking about millions of deaths, all caused by a bad habits lifestyle, which not only surpass cancer in terms of mortality rates but also indicate a trend of increasing cardiovascular related deaths among cancer survivors. A life of inactivity not only causes physical problems but also deteriorates the mental health of patients affected by it.
Exercise can improve mental health since it releases endorphins, hormones that make us feel happy or calm. According to a recent study by Annual Review of Medicine, "Of 1.2 million US adults, in which participants were matched across numerous background and demographic factors, individuals who exercised reported better mental health functioning compared to non-exercisers" (Smith and Merwin, 2021). Exercise not only reduces the posibilities of a chronic disease and increases your quality of life, but it also helps the right development of mental health. Physical activity produces a sense of well-being in us that we should trust due to the neurological process that happens in our heads when we exercise.
As a conclusion, To promote a healthy lifestyle and reduce cardiovascular diseases we need to know the impact of exercise has not only in physical aspects, but also in our mental health. Recognising the risk of chronic conditions when we have an inactive life and poor cardiovascular health is very helpful to reduce the mortality rates of diseases related to poor diet, and mental health disorders. If we take responsibility as a society for this health crisis, we can prevent so many complications since the very first life stages of our youngest population. This create the hope for a positive structural change in our health system and our way to socially deal with chronic cardiovascular diseases. The human body is a perfect machine, it is our duty to keep it working in the right way