Slow walking pace may up risk of death from heart disease

London, August 31
People who are slow walkers may be at higher risk of death due to heart diseases compared to the general population, a study has found.
The data analysed was collected between 2006 and 2010 by the UK Biobank from nearly half a million middle-aged people across the UK.
As many as 420,727 people were included in the research because they were free from cancer and heart disease at the time of collecting their information.
In the following 6.3 years after the data was collected there were 8,598 deaths with the sample population being studied: 1,654 from cardiovascular disease and 4,850 from cancer.
“Our study was interested in the links between whether someone said they walked at a slow, steady or brisk pace and whether that could predict their risk of dying from heart disease or cancer in the future,” said Tom Yates, from the University of Leicester in the UK.
“Slow walkers were around twice as likely to have a heart-related death compared to brisk walkers,” said Yates, principal investigator of the study published in the European Heart Journal.
“This finding was seen in both men and women and was not explained by related risk factors such as smoking, body mass index, diet or how much television the participants in the sample watched. This suggests habitual walking pace is an independent predictor of heart-related death,” said Yates.
“We also found that self-reported walking pace was strongly linked to an individual’s objectively measured exercise tolerance, further suggesting walking pace is a good measure of overall physical fitness,” he said.
“Therefore, self-reported walking pace could be used to identify individuals who have low physical fitness and high mortality risk that would benefit from targeted physical exercise interventions,” he added.