Standing desks aren't effective at lowering blood pressure after all. In fact, they could even be bad for you, new research finds.
Many people invested hundreds of dollars in a standing desk thinking it will keep them from being sedentary during workdays and help lower their blood pressure. In fact, a 2017 study on the effects of alternating standing and sitting on blood pressure concluded that a sit-stand desk may be a way to lower BP.
Eight years later, a new study has proven otherwise.
Researchers from the West Virginia University tried to determine whether behavioral intervention, like sit-stand desks, could reduce blood pressure among people with hypertension. What they found out is the peice of furnitrure did nothing to aid lowering blood pressure.
"Blood pressure didn’t improve at all, not with resting blood pressure, ambulatory blood pressure or pulse wave velocity," Bethany Barone Gibbs, chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the WVU School of Public Health, explained in a press release.
"That’s important because I think a lot of people are using sit-stand desks and think that might help their blood pressure."
The research also found that people who stood for longer periods per hour had increased aortic arterial stiffness--a measure of the elasticity of the blood vessel wall that can be a marker for the early stages of a cardiovascular disease, the National Library of Medicine explained.
This suggests that just like sitting for long periods, prolonged static standing may also be bad for the health.
“Whenever you flex the muscles in your calves by walking or moving, those muscle contractions are helping to push the blood up through this one-way valve," Barone Gibbs explained.
She added that standing at a desk and not moving has the same blood pooling effects as sitting, "but worse because it’s even harder for your blood to push back up to your brain in a standing posture."
Nonetheless, the lead study author says there are still benefits to sit-stand desks, including reliefe from back pain and regulating blood sugar levels.
The study was published in the journal Circulation.
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