Heart study finds how many steps you need to lengthen your life

St Stephen's Day 5KM Run/Walk in aid of the IHCPT

placeholder image — St Stephen's Day 5KM Run/Walk in aid of the IHCPT

Increasing your step count can decrease your mortality risk, although the minimum level required for benefits is much less than the much touted 10,000 steps, a new report outlines.

The study, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, found that the number of steps a person needs to walk each day to benefit their health could be lower than previously thought.

Walking at least 3,967 steps a day helped a person start to reduce their risk of dying from any cause, researchers found.

And just 2337 steps are required to reduce cardiovascular disease mortality.

However, the report does find that the more steps you take, the better it is for you.

"There is strong evidence showing that sedentary life may significantly increase the risk of cardiovascular (CV) disease and shorten the lifespan. However, the optimal number of steps, both the cut-off points over which we can see health benefits, and the upper limit (if any), and their role in health are still unclear," the report finds.

In a meta-analysis of 17 studies with almost 227 000 participants that assessed the health effects of physical activity expressed by walking measured in the number of steps, the researchers showed that a 1000-step increment correlated with a significant reduction of all-cause mortality of 15%, and similarly, a 500-step increment correlated with a reduced risk of CV mortality of 7%.

"It is the first analysis that not only looked at age and sex but also regional differences based on the weather zones, and for the first time, it assesses the effect of up to 20 000 steps/day on outcomes (confirming the more the better), which was missed in previous analyses.

"The analysis also revealed that depending on the outcomes, we do not need so many steps to have health benefits starting with even 2500/4000 steps/day, which, in fact, undermines the hitherto definition of a sedentary life," the report notes.

'The association between daily step count and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality: a meta-analysis' was published recently in The European Journal of Preventative Cardiology.