Apparently, watching too much TV could kill you.
I love Netflix. I probably started an unhealthy habit of binge watching when I was in college but, Netflix turned that habit into a whole new level. With so many great TV shows and movies at my disposal, it’s hard to not watch TV nowadays. However, a new study suggests that watching too much TV could kill you.
According to a study that started as far back as 1988, Japanese researchers are now connecting the amount of hours people watch TV per day to a large increase in the risk of dying from a pulmonary embolism – a lung blood clot.
So how does someone get a pulmonary embolism?
A blood clot typically starts in the legs or pelvis due to slowed blood flow and inactivity. The blood clot breaks free and then travels to a smaller blood vessell and gets stuck. This is extremely dangerous, and if you watch TV all day, this inactivity could result in the formation of blood clots.
From Science News Journal:
The Japanese researchers asked 86,024 participants between 1988 and 1990 how many hours they spent watching TV. They specifically targeted people aged between 40 and 79. Tracking these people over the next 19 years, they found that 59 participants had died of a pulmonary embolism.
Here’s what the study found out. If you watched 2.5 to 4.9 hours of TV/day your chance of a pulmonary embolism increases by 70% and every additional 2 hours of TV you watch/day your chances of a pulmonary embolism increases by 40%.
To make things worse, it’s very difficult for doctors to diagnose a pulmonary embolism because the symptoms of a pulmonary embolism are the same as other life-threatening diseases. These symptoms include chest pain and shortness of breath. A proper diagnosis requires the use of expensive equipment that many hospitals do not have and insurance companies will not cover.
However, it’s important to point out that there are other factors associated with this secret killer such as obesity, diabetes, cigarette smoking and hypertension, all of which could also cause pulmonary embolism. So it’s important to remember correlation does not equal causation.
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