The Economic Benefits of Increased Physical Activity as Seen Through an Objective Lens

Abstract

Over a lifetime, the annual per capita direct and indirect costs associated with cardiovascular disease amount to around 1 year’s salary for the average wage-earner. Additional costs arise from other forms of chronic disease where physical activity could potentially play a preventive role. Questionnaires and other methods of categorizing an individual’s habitual physical activity suggest that per capita health-care costs may be half as great in those members of the community who are classed as physically active, and some authors have thus argued that overall costs could be halved if everyone were to become active. Objective monitoring is now offering the potential for a more precise gradation of the costs attributable to individual diseases in relation to levels of habitual physical activity. Rather than assuming a generic beneficial effect of “activity,” it has become possible to quantitate the magnitude of the economic benefits likely from the small increases of activity that can be achieved in sedentary populations with respect to each of a range of chronic diseases. The application of objective monitoring demonstrates that the greatest economic benefit is likely from changing the behaviour of the most sedentary individuals in a given population. It also identifies specific clinical conditions where an increase of habitual physical activity should yield large financial dividends. If applied on a large scale, objective monitoring offers the potential for prospective monitoring of the effects of defined increases in exercise behaviour upon immediate charges to the health care system, as well as an objective assessment of the costs of motivating defined changes in physical activity patterns. To date, objective monitors have only been applied to two economic analyses in elderly people (where the primary activity of walking is readily monitored, but also where a substantial fraction of population health care costs are incurred). Extension of these analyses to younger adults is desirable, but it will require the development of a second generation of objective monitors that can respond accurately to the full range of sports and pastimes pursued by the younger generation.