Experts issue a health warning over standing desks, but you still shouldn't be sitting down all day - so what's the answer?

Standing at a desk for too long can come with health risks

News By Stephen Warwick published 17 October 2024

The world of health and fitness has been rocked by the potentially devastating news that standing desks could be bad for your health.

“Standing desks may be bad for your health, study suggests,” “Experts issue a health warning to anyone who uses a standing desk,” and “Why standing desks could be bad for your health” have all crossed my timeline this morning. So what on earth is going on? And is it time to ditch your standing desk?

The flurry of articles all stem from a new study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology on October 16. The snappily titled ‘Device-measured stationary behavior and cardiovascular and orthostatic circulatory disease incidence’ is a study of more than 83,000 UK adults over the course of nearly seven years.

The research, conducted by Dr Matthew Ahmadi of the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Medicine and Health in Australia, set out to examine the link between sitting, standing, and stationary time, cardiovascular disease (CVD), and orthostatic circulatory disease. The results at first glance appear like a blow to the appeal of standing desks – but there’s much more to it than that.

Standing desks aren’t the silver bullet you might have hoped

The study acknowledges that public health strategies and common advice often promote standing “as a sufficient substitute” for sitting in an office environment. However, the results of this mammoth study show that both sitting and standing for too long can be bad for your health. According to the study, doing too much of either can increase the risk of the two aforementioned ailments – CVD and orthostatic circulatory disease such as orthostatic hypotension, varicose vein, chronic venous insufficiency, and venous ulcer.

According to the study, “Every additional hour above 10 h/day of sitting was associated with a 0.26 (0.18, 0.36) higher risk,” of orthostatic circulatory diseases. Crucially, however, the risk of these diseases also increased (although not as much) with every 30 additional minutes of standing for more than two hours per day.

In contrast, the risk of CVD increased with every extra hour of sitting, but “Time spent standing was not associated with major CVD risk.”

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