A new study has found a link between TV watching and eight different ways of death. Researchers said that cancer, heart disease, diabetes, influenza/pneumonia, Parkinson's, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, liver disease and suicide.

Researchers started going through data from a study in which 567,169 US people aged 50 to 71 years were surveyed. These people were surveyed about their health and diet. In the next part, the researchers have compared survey data taken between 1995 and 1996 with a follow-up data, whose information was taken after 15 to 16 years.

Study researchers were left with 221,426 people who answered the questions about television watching as well as started the time period healthy. After comparing and going through the results, the researchers reached at the conclusion that the death risk increases when a person watches television for more than a couple of hours of TV a day.

Those who watched 3 to 4 hours of television a day were 15% more likely to die than those who watched one to two hours of television. Those who watched seven or more hours a day were 47% more likely to die. The researchers said that even exercise could not put an end to those associations.

According to the researchers at the U.S. National Cancer Institute, excessive TV watching may contribute to some of the leading causes of deaths in the US. During the study, the researchers studied the health records of 220,000 aged between 50 and 71.

The team found that more time adults spent watching TV, the more likely they were to die from a range of conditions, including liver disease, pneumonia, heart disease, Parkinson's disease, diabetes and cancer. The researchers say that their study findings were in agreement with studies conducted in the past that link too much sitting with the occurrence of adverse health effects.

The researchers further say that the risk rate increased to 47 percent for people who spend more than 7 hours a day watching TV. The increased risk of death remained even when the researchers accounted for other risk factors, including alcohol consumption and smoking.

The study's lead author notes that because "television viewing is the most prevalent leisure-time sedentary behavior"—Americans spend more than half of their leisure time in front of the TV, she says — it's likely "an indicator of overall physical inactivity," per a release.

She adds the "results fit within a growing body of research indicating that too much sitting can have many different adverse health effects," though she cautions that because links to some causes of death appeared for the first time in this study, more research is needed.

"Our results fit within a growing body of research indicating that too much sitting can have many different adverse health effects", said Dr. Sarah Keadle, study's lead researcher.