However, this studies falls short of demonstrating that "strongly", or the claim than sitting makes some part of your brain thinner.
When looking at the data, age is the most important contributing factor, but the authors do not perform any multivariate measurement of age vs physical activities vs sitting time. Maybe it's because they don't feel the need to since, and they state it:"As with total MTL thickness, physical activity was not associated with any of the subregional thicknesses."
By redoing this study, including a many more participants, across the country, actually measuring physical health parameters instead of simply doing a survey. I also think they should have used non-parametric tests. I don't believe, and they don't show any indication otherwise, that their sampled population had a normal distribution, was in sufficient numbers, and the some of the metrics were independent from each others.
Since their data set is available and rather simple, one can readily redo the tests and find out that the strongest relation is Age vs MTL, that Age vs Physical activities also correlates strongly, as does Age vs Sitting. Contrary to what the authors reported, sitting and activities also correlates... So yeah that's a bust!
However, this studies falls short of demonstrating that "strongly", or the claim than sitting makes some part of your brain thinner.
When looking at the data, age is the most important contributing factor, but the authors do not perform any multivariate measurement of age vs physical activities vs sitting time. Maybe it's because they don't feel the need to since, and they state it:"As with total MTL thickness, physical activity was not associated with any of the subregional thicknesses."
By redoing this study, including a many more participants, across the country, actually measuring physical health parameters instead of simply doing a survey. I also think they should have used non-parametric tests. I don't believe, and they don't show any indication otherwise, that their sampled population had a normal distribution, was in sufficient numbers, and the some of the metrics were independent from each others.
Since their data set is available and rather simple, one can readily redo the tests and find out that the strongest relation is Age vs MTL, that Age vs Physical activities also correlates strongly, as does Age vs Sitting. Contrary to what the authors reported, sitting and activities also correlates... So yeah that's a bust!