22,706 UK adults who do not exercise wore wrist trackers.

Claims 111@DeSciClaims

22,706 UK adults who do not exercise wore wrist trackers. Those whose trackers recorded four minutes of vigorous movement a day were diagnosed 36% less often with type 2 diabetes over 8 years. But the study does not establish causality. This paper went through Claims last week. The record includes 17 adjudicated claims, each tied to its evidence. Each person wore the tracker for a week. Software read the raw signal and picked out bursts of vigorous movement lasting a minute or less, the kind that come from climbing stairs or walking briskly to the shop. The diagnoses came from digital health records: 665 of the 22,706 developed type 2 diabetes. Nobody was asked to move more. The trackers recorded what people already did. But people who move briskly through their day may differ from those who do not in ways no model captures. The researchers, Emmanuel Stamatakis' group at the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre @CPC_usyd, name a second caveat themselves: prediabetes that nobody had diagnosed when the study began. They tested both. They left out anyone diagnosed in the first 2 years, then re-ran the numbers without people in poor health. The link held. They still write that an observational study "cannot provide definitive evidence of the causality of the observed associations". #MedTwitter Chong et al. (2026), Diabetes Care. doi.org/10.2337/dc25-3018

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