Muscle Strength Explains the Protective Effect of Physical Activity against COVID-19 Hospitalization among Adults aged 50 Years and Older
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Objectives Physical activity has been proposed as a protective factor for COVID-19 hospitalization. However, the mechanisms underlying this association are unclear. Here, we examined the association between physical activity and COVID-19 hospitalization and whether this relationship was explained by other risk factors for severe COVID-19. Method We used data from adults aged 50 years and older from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. The outcome was self-reported hospitalization due to COVID-19 measured before August 2020. The main exposure was usual physical activity, self-reported between 2004 and 2017. Data were analyzed using logistic regression models. Results Among the 3139 participants included in the study (69.3 ± 8.5 years, 1763 women), 266 were tested positive for COVID-19 and 66 were hospitalized. Results showed that individuals who engaged in physical activity more than once a week had lower odds of COVID-19 hospitalization than individuals who hardly ever or never engaged in physical activity (odds ratios = 0.41, 95% confidence interval = 0.22–0.74, p = .004). This association between physical activity and COVID-19 hospitalization was explained by muscle strength, but not by other risk factors. Conclusion These findings suggest that, after 50 years of age, engaging in physical activity more than once a week is associated with lower odds of COVID-19 hospitalization. The protective effect of physical activity on COVID-19 hospitalization is explained by muscle strength.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".