Finally a medical justification for shopping at lunchtime!

There was a front-page article in the paper this morning which has generated quite a bit of discussion here at work...

"Sitting at Your Desk is a Killer!"

NOT to be interpreted as you yourself actually being a killer, or somebody else sitting at your desk about to murder you, but the action of sitting at your desk killing you. Am I making sense lol.

Basically, research suggests that workers who spend excessive amounts of time at their desk could be putting their lives at risk. Researchers at The Medical Research Institute in New Zealand found that a third of patients admitted to hospital with DVT were office workers who spent hours at a computer. The study will be published in the New Zealand Medical Journal if anyone's interested in reading the whole thing. DVT is the formation of a blood clot in a deep vein, most commonly in the legs. The clots can travel to the heart, lungs or brain, causing chest pain, breathlessness or possible death from a heart attack or stroke. Lead researcher Professor Richard Beasley said some office workers who developed clots sat at their screens for 14 hours a day. He said: "Some of them were going three to four hours at a time without getting up."
People nowadays have a tendency to work longer hours than ever before, and often don't take a proper lunch break, preferring instead to eat a sandwich at their desk while attending to emails.

Hands up who's guilty of this! *Putting my hand up* I don't go out of the office at lunchtime. Yes, I sit and eat at my desk... not while attending to e-mails... but while blogging lol. I always get up and walk around though (I go to the printer, the water cooler, to get a coffee...) But starting today I'm going to start going out for a 30 minute walk each lunchtime, at the request of the Chief Exec. He's a Starbucks man so I have a lot of respect for him lol. Mind you, I think he meant a brisk walk, whereas I meant a walk to and around the shops lol.

And just to finish this post on a real downwards spiral, DVT affects about 100,000 people and kills up to 1,000 people in the UK each year!!

The full BBC story can be read here.