CHB 2.2: Literature Review
Deriving direct effects of remote working to individual’s health
It is well known that individual lifestyles and behaviors are strongly correlated with health and longevity (Woods et al., 2020). Further, measures of physical fitness, i.e. cardiorespiratory fitness (Barry et al., 2014), strength and muscle mass (Li et al., 2018), are considered as strong predictors of health and longevity. Since changes in behaviors and lifestyle can directly influence measures of physical fitness, it is of considerable interest to improve predictors of health and longevity through manipulating physical activity, exercise engagement, eating behaviors, etc. While WHO physical activity guidelines focus on the accumulation of a minimum volume of aerobic exercise (Wen et al., 2011), higher intensity of effort (i.e. relative challenge [Steele et al., 2017]) approaches were shown to be more effective in reducing morbidity and mortality risk factors (Steele et al., 2017). Generally, it seems that physical activity and exercise act in a dose-response manner upon their effect on overall health (Vina et al., 2012). However, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO recommendations were not met (WHO, 2020a). More recent research suggests that with the COVID-19 pandemic, devastating threats to individual lifestyles, global health and economy have been emerging (Ugbolue et al., 2020).
When attempting to estimate potential suffer and harm of COVID-19 to individual’s health, people’s lifestyle and behavior are crucial to consider for analysis next to demographic factors, i.e. age, medical conditions (Woods et al., 2020). Governments all over the world have recommended to stay at home as much as possible, sport facilities have been closed and work has been shifted to remote work (Government of the Netherlands, 2020). While periods spent at one’s residential place increase accordingly, these confinements have severe effects on PA, exercise levels and eating behaviors. In fact, ‘it has never been easier to be physically inactive’ (Kirwan et al., 2020). These phenomena combined with less than adequate home working set-ups hold the potential to entail wide-reaching consequences for individual health and hence threaten global health and economy, since employee health is crucial for corporate performance.
With strong scientific evidence, PA and daily exercise are shown to improve immune function, as well as protect against metabolic, cardiovascular and musculoskeletal disease (Vina et al., 2012), particularly when combined with adequate nutrition strategies (Kirwan et al., 2020). On the other hand, being physical inactive is associated with declines in cognitive and muscular function, i.e. loss of muscle mass (Breen et al., 2013), aerobic fitness (Bowden Davies et al., 2019) while increasing fat accumulation (Rabøl et al., 2011). Thus, exercise is a proven and frequently applied therapy for both health and disease (Vina et al., 2012). Next to reduced PA (Schladen et al., 2020), increases in sedentariness have been reported in multiple studies (Ammar et al., 2020; Sun et al., 2020) following COVID-19 confinements which was shown to negatively impact health outcomes, too (Patterson et al., 2018). Increased times spent sitting may be partly explained through the shift remote work and its inherent conditions. As such, increased remote working may prolong sedentary periods proportionally and thereby increase its risk for health. Further, studies have investigated less than adequate home working environments (Moretti et al., 2020), which may amplify the inherent negative effects of prolonged sitting on health even further. Indeed, suboptimal workplace set-ups were suggested to negatively affect spinal health and accelerate the development of MSKd (Kakar & Lomond, 2020). In addition, studies have shown that COVID-19 confinements seem to negatively impact people’s eating behavior, i.e. affecting food choices and diet quality (Ammar et al., 2020; Kirwan et al., 2020), which may further promote fat accumulation (Rabøl et al., 2011). The consequences of COVID-19 confinements appear to be seriously concerning for individual’s health as they entail multiple risks, seeming to aggravate physical inactivity and sedentary behavior (Woods et al., 2020). In fact, physical inactivity and sedentariness are among the leading risk factors for overall disease morbidity (Patterson et al., 2020; Vina et al., 2012).
