Approved Research

Associations among 24-hour movement behaviours and markers of physical and mental health, cognitive and physical functioning, metabolic risk, and disease status: A compositional data analysis approach

Lay summary

Each day, people engage in the behaviours of sleep, sedentary time, light physical activity, and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Separately, these behaviours have been shown to predict a number of health outcomes such as a person's mental health, their risk of disease, their physical health, and their functional ability. However, the analyses conducted previously do not account for the fact that over a 24-hour period (or 1440 minutes), a change in the amount of one behaviour naturally results in changes to the other behaviours. In this work, an analysis that captures collective 24-hour movement behaviour data appropriately will be used to see how different daily patterns relate to important health outcomes (i.e., essentially, "what makes for a healthy or unhealthy day"). These outcomes include measures of mental health such as depression and anxiety, subjective well-being (e.g., mood and happiness), cognitive function (e.g., memory, reasoning, reaction time), physical functioning (e.g., handgrip strength, blood pressure, body size measurements), metabolic risk (i.e., a combination of factors that predict important outcomes such coronary heart disease and stroke), and disease status (e.g., having heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc). In addition to academic impact, it is expected that the results of this project will inform public health policy and practice.