Pace as important as 10,000 steps for health



The "sweet spot" for reducing your risk of disease and mortality is 10,000 steps per day, but recent research suggests that your walking speed may be just as significant.

The studies, which tracked 78,500 participants with wearable trackers and were published in the journals JAMA Internal Medicine and JAMA Neurology, are the largest to systematically examine step count in connection to health outcomes.

Achieving 10,000 steps per day is linked to a lower risk of dementia, heart disease, cancer, and death, according to studies from the Universities of Sydney in Australia and Southern Denmark. A power walk, however, demonstrated advantages above and beyond the amount of steps completed.

"The take-home message here is that people could not only ideally aim for 10,000 steps a day for protective health benefits but also aim to walk faster," said Dr. Matthew Ahmadi, co-lead author and Research Fellow at the Charles Perkins Centre and Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney.

According to co-lead author Associate Professor Borja del Pozo Cruz of the University of Southern Denmark and senior health researcher at the University of Cadiz, "our study also reveals that as little as 3,800 steps a day can lower the risk of dementia by 25% for less active persons."

Up to 10,000 steps per day, there was an incremental 8–11% reduction in the risk of early death for every 2,000 steps.

For the incidence of cancer and cardiovascular disease, similar relationships were seen.

A lower risk of dementia from any cause was linked to doing more steps each day.

The best dose of 9,800 steps was found to cut dementia risk by 50%, although risk was also lowered by 25% at doses as low as 3,800 steps per day.

Over and above total daily steps, stepping intensity or a faster speed demonstrated favorable relationships for all outcomes (dementia, heart disease, cancer, and mortality).

"Step count is simply understood and frequently utilized by the public to assess activity levels thanks to the rising popularity of fitness trackers and apps, but people rarely consider about the tempo of their steps," said senior author and University of Sydney professor Emmanuel Stamatakis.

The results of these studies may assist produce the first official step-based physical activity guidelines and efficient public health initiatives focused at reducing chronic disease.

How was the research done?

The participants wore a wrist accelerometer to measure physical activity over a period of 7 days and the study used data from UK Biobank to correlate step count data from 78,500 UK people aged 40 to 79 years with health outcomes 7 years afterwards (minimum 3 days, including a weekend day and monitoring during sleep periods).

Through a number of data sources and registries, such as inpatient hospital records, primary care records, cancer and death registries, this information was connected with the participants' health records with ethics approval.

Statistical adjustments were also made for confounders, such as the fact that people who do more steps generally walk faster. Only those who were free of cardiovascular disease, cancer, or dementia at baseline and disease-free in the first two years of the study were included in the final assessment.

Although the studies are observational, which means they cannot demonstrate direct cause and effect, the researchers point out the strong and constant relationships found across both investigations at the population level.

The most substantial evidence to date that 10,000 steps per day is the magic number for health benefits and that walking quicker is related with extra advantages comes from the scale and scope of these studies employing wrist-worn trackers, according to Dr. Matthew Ahmadi.

"Additional studies using trackers over longer periods of time will shed more light on the health advantages linked with specific levels and intensities of daily stepping," says the author.

University of Sydney

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