How is "Leisure Television Watching" encoded by the genome?
How long do you usually watch TV in your leisure time? Leisurely watching TV is one of the most popular things to do to relax. For scientists, tracking leisure behaviors like watching TV helps them understand someones resting heart rate and how long they are sedentary, which is just how long someone is sitting, reclining, or laying.
Prolonged time spent engaging in sedentary behaviors, such as television watching, computer use, and driving, has been associated with an increased risk of developing heart disease, though watching television seems to be most strongly associated with heart disease. An epidemiological explanation is that leisurely TV-watching is associated with fewer and shorter breaks, lower total energy expenditure, and different snacking behaviors than other passive activities. These unique characteristics of TV-watching may increase the adverse effects of prolonged sitting.
To identify genetic determinants associated with sedentary leisure behaviors and whether they are a causal risk factor for heart disease, researchers performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) on three types of sedentary behaviors in 408,815 study participants. More specifically, the activities examined in the study were times spent leisurely watching television, leisurely using a computer, and driving. Participants were asked, “On a typical day, how many hours do you spend watching TV?” to assess the amount of leisure time spent watching TV. The GWAS revealed 193 variants in 169 loci associated with one or more sedentary traits. The large majority, 152 independent variants in 145 loci, were associated with this sedentary behavior, including genetic variants such as rs4845364 in the TPM3 gene, rs6673341 in the FAM129A gene, rs10189857 in the BCL11A gene, and rs263771 in the ZNF804A gene. In addition, high genetic correlations were observed between sedentary behavior and neurological traits, including education and body mass index (BMI). Increased BMI is one of the known risk factors traditionally associated with developing heart disease. These results suggest that reducing sedentary behaviors may help minimize the long-term risk of heart disease.
One of the limitations of this study is that the questionnaire did not include occupational sedentary behaviors, meaning conclusions cannot be generalized to total sedentary behavior. Future research efforts should expand the current set of analyses to total sedentary behavior, physical activity, and sleep behaviors, including motion data. Read more about the study here:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32317632/
Are you interested in learning more about your genetic tendency for leisure time spent TV watching? You can log in to your Genomelink TRAITS to see this new genetic trait.
