Add-on: ActiveLIFE

The new ActiveLIFE project aims to create tailor-made exercise guidelines that help everyone, healthy or sick, young or old, to move optimally. The aim of the project is to develop a large-scale Dutch dataset of objectively measured characteristics, with information on physical activity (amount, intensity, type), sitting behaviour (time, sessions, breaks) and sleep (duration). These data are added to information on behaviour (such as diet, smoking and alcohol), health (such as illness, medication, cognition, stress and quality of life) and risk factors (such as blood pressure, heart and lung function, muscle strength and signalling substances). The combination of these data is important for new insights into the impact of lifestyle on health and health outcomes.

More than half of the Dutch population, some 56%, does not exercise enough. This percentage is even higher among people with chronic conditions. It is known that an inactive lifestyle is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, brain disorders and premature death, among others. Sufficient exercise lowers this risk.  

The current 2017 Dutch exercise guideline supports this. This guideline recommends 150 minutes of moderate to intensive exercise per week, but is based on questionnaire surveys and not on exercise behaviour.  As such, the guideline does not yet take into account personal situations, health and preferences, which means the advice does not optimally match individual needs. It is possible that each individual differs how much they need to exercise to become healthier.

Exercise physiologist and project leader Thijs Eijsvogels says: 'With ActiveLIFE, we want to create the largest, most accurate dataset of upper leg exercise meters in the world. I am convinced that this will enable us to develop tailor-made exercise guidelines, which we can use to get and keep many more people in the Netherlands moving. What's important here is that a personalised approach makes people do something that suits them. Because we know that only then will you keep it up in the long term. That also applies to anyone with good intentions: choose an activity you like.'

The project is being set up by Radboudumc together with biobank Lifelines, which collects data from participants from the provinces of Groningen, Friesland and Drenthe. In total, participants will be followed for eight years, but there will be interim results before then. The project is supported by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, the Heart Foundation and the Brain Foundation.  The project is led by Radboudumc, in the person of exercise physiologist Dr Thijs Eijsvogels and epidemiologist Dr Esmée Bakker.