Faster walkers had 23% lower death risk over 12 years

Older adults who walked faster in a short clinic test had a 23% lower risk of dying over about 12 years. That’s the finding of a study in JAMA Network Open published Oct 23. Step cadence from a sensor worn on the wrist at home tracked almost as closely.

Rayane Haddadj of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology is the corresponding author, according to the JAMA Network release. The team followed 4,067 people in Whitehall II, a long running UK study. Their average age at the start was 69.3, and 74.4% were men.

What they measured

Each person walked 2.44 meters, about 8 feet, in a clinic test between January 2012 and December 2013. Each also wore an accelerometer on the wrist for 9 days.

From the wrist data the team pulled two cadence figures, in steps per minute. One was each person’s typical walking pace. The other was their fastest pace, the 95th percentile.

Deaths came from Britain’s national mortality register, through Aug 19, 2024. Median follow up was 11.8 years.

The results

The models adjusted for sociodemographic, behavioral and health factors. For each one standard deviation faster:

• Clinic walking speed: 23% lower risk of death (hazard ratio 0.77).
• Typical walking cadence: 17% lower (0.83).
• Fastest walking cadence: 18% lower (0.82).

All three ranked risk about equally well. The C index, a 0 to 1 score of how well a model sorts who died from who didn’t, was 0.747 for clinic speed. It was 0.744 for typical cadence and 0.745 for fastest cadence.

Only clinic walking speed made a model built on standard risk factors better at predicting death, the abstract says.

What it means

Earlier research tied walking speed to survival, the authors note. This study asked a narrower question: can a sensor worn during normal life stand in for a clinic test?

Their answer is that both can be used in population studies. The choice “may depend on research objectives, implementation constraints, and the strengths of each method,” they write.

That matters for wearables. Cadence is a measure a wrist device can collect over days of ordinary life, with no clinic visit.

This is an observational study. It shows a link between pace and death risk, not that walking faster adds years. Three in four people in the sample were men, all from one UK cohort, so the study doesn’t show how women or other countries compare.

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