Sedentary behavior, exercise and COVID 19: immune and metabolic implications in obesity and its comorbidities.
Many reports showed a dramatic decrease in the levels of physical activity during the current pandemic of SARS COV 2. This has substantial immune and metabolic implications, especially in those at risk or with metabolic diseases including individuals with obesity and Type 2 diabetes. Here we discuss the route from physical inactivity to immune and metabolic aberrancies; focusing on how insulin resistance could represent an adaptive mechanism to the low physical activity levels and on how such an adaptive mechanism could shift to a pathognomonic feature of metabolic diseases, creating a vicious circle of immune and metabolic aberrancies. We provide a theoretical framework to the severe immunopathology of COVID 19 in patients with metabolic diseases. We finally discuss the idea of exercise as a potential adjuvant against COVID 19 and emphasize how even interrupting prolonged periods of sitting with short time breaks of very light activity could be a feasible strategy to limit the deleterious effects of the outbreak.
The Journal of sports medicine and physical fitness