Older women need 4400 steps 10,000 steps to live longer

Study by Brigham and Women's Hospital shows that older women need 4,400 out of 10,000 marches to live longer

Older women may not need 10,000 steps per day for longer survival, an average of 4,400 may suffice.

In the world of step-by-step goals and activity tracking, the number 10,000 may seem magical. Many portable devices that track the number of steps a person takes each day are preprogrammed with a daily goal of 10,000 steps.

But while there is ample evidence that physical activity is beneficial to health and longevity, few studies have examined the number of steps per day badociated with good health, especially in the long term. A new study by investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital sought to fill this gap by examining the results over an average of more than four years for older women in the women's health study who had measured their week.

The team reports that in older women, performing as little as 4,400 steps per day was significantly badociated with a lower risk of death than doing 2,700 steps per day. The risk of death continued to decrease with the increase in the number of steps but stabilized around 7,500 steps per day, less than the default goal of 10,000 steps in many portable systems. The results of the team are presented today at the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine and published simultaneously in JAMA Internal Medicine.

In older women, having only 4,400 steps per day was significantly badociated with a risk of death lower than 2,700 steps per day. The risk of death continued to decrease with increasing number of steps but stabilized at approximately 7,500 steps per day

"Doing 10,000 steps a day can seem daunting. But we find that even a modest increase in the measures taken is linked to significantly lower mortality among older women, "said I-Min Lee, MBBS, ScD, an epidemiologist at Brigham's Division of Preventive Medicine. "Our study adds to a growing understanding of the importance of physical activity to health, clarifies the number of steps involved in lowering mortality and amplifies the message: An extra step – even a little more is helpful.

According to previous studies, the average number of steps taken by Americans is between 4,000 and 5,000 per day. The goal of the 10,000 steps is unclear, but could go back to 1965, when a Japanese company started marketing a pedometer called Manpo-kei, which is "10,000 steps" in Japanese.

To conduct their study, Lee and his colleagues included participants from the Women's Study, a randomized trial originally conducted to badess the risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer in women taking aspirin. low dose and vitamin E. At the end of the initial trial, participate in a long-term observational study. For this walk and health study, nearly 18,000 women were asked to wear an ActiGraph GT3X + – a research-type workwear on their hips for seven consecutive days, every hour of the previous day. The team badyzed 16,741 women who complied with the device; their average age was 72 years old.

Participants were followed for more than four years on average, during which 504 women died. Participants in the bottom 25% of markets (averaging 2,700 walks per day) were the most at risk of death, with 275 women dying. Those who walked modestly more (average of 4,400 people a day) had a 41% lower risk of death. The risk of death continued to decrease with the increase in the number of marches, up to 7,500 marches per day, after which the risk stabilized. The team also found that for women who walked the same number of marches a day, the intensity – their walking speed or slowness – was not badociated with the risk of death.

Due to the observational nature of the study, the authors can not definitively separate the cause of the correlation (ie, differentiate "more steps lower mortality?" Or "healthier women progress"). they more? "). However, the team took several steps to ensure that the badociation observed was more likely to be causal, for example by excluding women with heart disease, cancer, diabetes and diabetes. self-rated health status was less than excellent or good and excluding the first year of life. monitoring data. The results are also corroborated by previous experiments showing that physical activity resulted in beneficial changes in health markers in the short term, eg blood pressure, insulin / glucose levels, lipid profile, inflammation, etc.

The women's health study included mostly elderly and white women. Additional studies will be required of younger and more diverse populations to determine if the results apply to other groups, particularly those that could, on average, take more action. Other findings – such as quality of life and risk of specific diseases – have not been evaluated, but will be addressed in subsequent studies.

"Of course, no study is isolated. But our work continues to demonstrate the importance of physical activity, "Lee said. "Obviously, even a modest number of stages were linked to lower mortality rates in these older women. We hope these results will encourage people for whom 10,000 steps a day may seem inaccessible. "