Just sitting around is deadlier than smoking, diabetes and hypertension, according to two decades-plus of data obtained from medical treadmill stress tests published as part of a major study from a top U.S. hospital.

“Being unfit on a treadmill or in an exercise stress test has a worse prognosis, as far as death, than being hypertensive, being diabetic or being a current smoker,” study author Wael Jaber of the Cleveland Clinic told CNN. “We’ve never seen something as pronounced as this and as objective as this.”

Health professionals have been vocal about the health risks of an inactive lifestyle, noting that being sedentary could bring about chronic illness and disease such as high blood pressure and cholesterol, strokes, osteoporosis, depression, anxiety, type 2 diabetes and even certain cancers, the U.S. National Library of Medicine said.

Knowing this, researchers led by Jaber wanted to see how activity levels could impact mortality. For the study they analyzed nearly 25 years of data from 122,007 patients, looking specifically at cardiac fitness according to results from treadmill stress tests.

They then categorized the test results into five levels of fitness and found that each higher level offered benefits on mortality rates.

“With every increment of time spent on the treadmill during the exercise stress test, there is a benefit as far as mortality,” Jaber said in a statement. “It’s almost like giving a medication and giving a higher and higher dose of medication.”

Researchers also found that there was no point where a person could be too fit, meaning there was no indication that much cardiac fitness could negatively impact longevity.

The benefits of aerobic exercise were not limited to one specific age group or gender and Jaber noted that even those with a history of heart disease, heart risk factors, and the very elderly could benefit from better cardiac fitness.

“If you compare the risk of sitting versus the highest performing on the exercise test, the risk is about three times higher than smoking,” Jaber said, according to CNN.

Jordan Metzl, sports medicine physician at the Hospital for Special Surgery and author of the book “The Exercise Cure,” noted that cardiovascular disease and diabetes are the most expensive diseases in the U.S., and that the study highlighted the importance of promoting fitness to the public.

“We spend more than $200 billion per year treating these diseases and their complications,” he told CNN. “Rather than pay huge sums for disease treatment, we should be encouraging our patients and communities to be active and exercise daily.”

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