Walking is an easy way to get active and stay active. It's a cardio exercise that can help us live a healthier life by maintaining a healthy weight, strengthening our bones and muscles, and even preventing and managing conditions, including heart disease. Your walking speed can say a lot about your physical fitness, and a recent study found it can also predict the likelihood of dying from heart disease.
Middle-age adults who were slow walkers were about twice as likely to die from heart disease compared to fast walkers during the study period. Those with a low body mass index (BMI) faced the highest risk, which suggests people who were malnourished or had high levels of muscle tissue loss with age were more susceptible. In addition, slow walkers also had low fitness levels; this could explain their higher risk of heart disease death.
The findings, published in the European Heart Journal, held true even after researchers accounted for factors like exercise habits, diets, and whether people smoked or drank alcohol.
"This suggests habitual walking pace is an independent predictor of heart-related death," said Professor Tom Yates, principal investigator of the study and a reader in physical activity, sedentary behavior and health at the University of Leicester, in a statement.
Yates and his colleagues analyzed data collected by the UK Biobank between 2006 and 2010 on about half a million middle-aged people in the UK. At the beginning of the study, over 420,000 people were free from cancer and heart disease. After the six-year followup, there were 8,598 deaths: an estimated 1,654 died from heart disease and 4,850 from cancer. The researchers also analyzed actual handgrip strength via dynamometer to determine if it was a good predictor of cancer or heart-related deaths. However, no consistent link was found between walking speed and cancer-related deaths nor handgrip strength and heart and cancer-related deaths.
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