By Amrith Ramkumar
It’s been deemed one of the 10 leading risk factors for death, but it turns out that physical inactivity also comes with a hefty tab”•$67.5 billion, to be exact.
The first study quantifying the global costs of sloth was published Thursday in the scientific journal The Lancet, finding what researchers labeled a conservative estimate of the economic burden caused by inactivity.
More than 40 percent of that total, $27.8 billion, is attributed to the US, illustrating a gap between high- and low-income countries. Lower- and middle-income countries shared 75 percent of the disease burden but less than 20 percent of the economic burden, said Melody Ding, lead author of the study and a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney’s school of public health.
“The most striking finding is not the actual number, it’s the distribution of the economic burden across regions,” Ding said. “In wealthy countries, people pay with their pockets. In less wealthy countries, they’re paying with their lives.”
The researchers estimated the costs by looking at expenses, productivity losses, and disability-adjusted life-years for five major diseases related to inactivity”•coronary heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, breast cancer and colon cancer. Type 2 diabetes was the most expensive disease, accounting for $37.6 billion of the economic burden, a 70 percent share of all direct health costs. In the US, direct costs represented a slightly bigger piece of inactivity-related expenses, 88.8 percent, compared with 79.7 percent globally.
To make sure the costs were attributable to physical inactivity, the researchers used previous estimates of how physical inactivity affects the diseases and the prevalence of inactivity in each country to calculate country-specific costs.
