Daily exercise linked to fewer diabetes deaths in China
Daily leisure-time exercise was linked to a hazard ratio of 0.67 for death from diabetes compared with no such exercise.
Our read
Populations- Studied:
- Preprint: cohort study of 1,565,890 Chinese adults aged 65 years or older, median 5.06 years (Multicenter)
- What changed:
- Death from diabetes was lower among daily exercisers than people reporting no leisure-time exercise (hazard ratio 0.67)
- The catch:
- Pre-existing poor health can limit exercise and increase mortality, reversing the apparent causal direction
- In the record:
- The 92nd paper on leisure-time physical activity with results in people; 122 on record in all. Its result on mortality agrees with all 10 other findings on record.
Editor of record: Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
Chinese adults aged 65 or older—1,565,890 people, 53.22% of them women—were followed in a prospective observational cohort study in three cities. Exercise habits came from routine health examinations. Over a median 5.06 years, 5,584 participants died from diabetes.
After accounting for factors including age, smoking and existing diseases, daily leisure-time exercise was associated with lower mortality from diabetes. The hazard ratio was 0.67 compared with no leisure-time exercise, a relative comparison of death rates during follow-up. Daily exercise had the most consistent association across additional analyses. The link remained when researchers excluded participants who already had diabetes.
Why it matters
Community health programs serving older adults routinely collect exercise information. The findings may help those programs interpret these records in relation to death from diabetes.
Caveats
Activity measures relied on baseline self-reports and did not capture exercise intensity or total weekly duration; daily exercisers may also have been healthier to begin with. The findings cover adults aged 65 or older in three Chinese cities and come from a preprint that has not been peer-reviewed.
From the paper
- Participants
A total of 1,565,890 participants (mean age, 70.98 years; 53.22% women) were included, of whom 56.89% reported no LTPA and 33.83% reported daily LTPA.
- Follow-up
During a median follow-up of 5.06 years (interquartile range, 3.30–6.73 years), 5,584 deaths from diabetes and 185,815 all-cause deaths occurred.
- Result
Compared with no LTPA, the fully adjusted HRs for mortality from diabetes were 0.86 (95% CI, 0.74–1.01) for occasional LTPA, 0.83 (0.73–0.94) for LTPA at least once weekly but not daily, and 0.67 (0.62–0.72) for daily LTPA.
Quoted word for word from the full text on researchsquare.com.
The paper
Chinese Center For Disease Control and Prevention; Shenzhen Chronic Disease Prevention Center
Research Square, Nov 6, 2026, Open access, Preprint, not yet peer-reviewed
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