Don't Just Sit There, Do Something! Part 10 Women's Bone Health

OK, let's just cut to the chase. Physical activity is important.  Physical activity is good for you.  Even if you're diabetic.  And especially if you're a premenopausal female worried about her bones in a study published early online in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism in which the authors concluded that physical activity improved markers of bone health.

Granted, there was quite a bit of statistics to wade through in this study.  But my understanding is that the authors performed a cross-sectional analysis of 1,235 34yo premenopausal overweight (body mass index 27kg/m2) women divided into groups dependent upon physical activity.  Those who exercised >120min/week demonstrated better markers of bone health compared to their sedentary controls.  A subset of 120 women were then randomized to 8 weeks of physical activity at 120min/wk vs remaining sedentary.  Again, those who exercised to that degree demonstrated better bone health markers compared to their sedentary controls.

So, is this study the final word?  Absolutely not!  The cross-sectional study only demonstrates a correlation but is not proof of causation.  The randomized controlled trial is too small & too short for generalization.  In this day & age of inclusiveness, as much as I'd like to ignore the impact of ethnicity, I can't just assume that a study of Saudi women is generalizable to the rest of the global population.  Most importantly, this RCT only looked at markers of disease, rather than disease outcomes, or even more important, all-cause mortality.  

So, clearly, no, this study is not the final word.  But it supports the hypothesis that regular physical activity >120min/week  is a good thing.

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