How fast older people normally walk may say something about how long they will live. A study published in the journal JAMA Network Open followed 4,067 adults in the UK, who were about 69 years old on average, to see whether their usual walking pace was linked to their risk of death over time.1 Over nearly 12 years, faster walkers had a lower risk of dying, even after the researchers accounted for other health and lifestyle factors.1
The finding fits a long line of earlier research. It is an observational study, meaning researchers watched what happened to people rather than asking some of them to change how they walk. So it can show a link but not that walking faster causes a longer life.2
What the study found
Participants did two things. They completed a short walking test at their normal pace, and they wore a wrist activity tracker for nine days so the researchers could capture their walking speed during everyday life.1 Having both measures matters: one shows how a person walks when asked to in a test, the other shows how they actually move around day to day.
During the follow-up period, 739 of the 4,067 participants died.1 Faster walking in both settings, the test and daily life, was linked to a lower risk of death.1 The coverage available to Biohack did not report the exact size of the difference in risk between faster and slower walkers, so this article does not give one.
Beth Templin, a board-certified geriatric clinical specialist and CEO of HouseFit Physical Therapy & Fitness in St. Louis, who was not involved in the study, explained why physical therapists pay close attention to this measure.1
“In physical therapy, we call walking speed the ‘sixth vital sign’ because it’s a snapshot of how well many body systems are working together.”
Templin said walking briskly takes strong legs, a healthy heart and lungs, good balance, and a brain and nervous system that can coordinate it all. When walking speed starts to slip, she said, it is often an early warning sign that one of those systems is declining, sometimes before anything shows up on a lab test.1
What it does not show yet
The central limit is the type of study. Templin put it plainly: “This study shows an association, not proof that walking faster by itself adds years.”2 People who walk quickly may also be healthier in many other ways, and a link between two things does not show that changing one will change the other.
Coverage of the study pointed to other limits. The participants were generally healthier than the wider population, and measurements from wrist trackers can vary from person to person, which makes it harder to apply the results broadly.2 More studies are needed to see whether the findings hold in more diverse groups of people.2
The study also cannot say whether slower walking is a cause of poorer health or simply a sign of it. Templin’s description of walking speed as an early warning sign points toward the second reading, but the study itself was not designed to settle that question.1
Who is behind it
The study appeared in JAMA Network Open, a peer-reviewed medical journal.1 The news coverage Biohack reviewed did not name the study’s authors, their institutions or who funded the work, and Biohack did not have access to the paper itself. Readers should treat details such as the exact risk figures and funding as still to be confirmed from the published paper.
The outside expert quoted in coverage, Templin, runs a physical therapy and fitness business and was not part of the research team.1
How it fits earlier research
Walking speed, which researchers often call gait speed, has been studied as a health signal for years. A rehabilitation reference from the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab describes the test as timing how long a person takes to walk a short, level distance of about 3 to 10 meters, and notes that it is not a measure of endurance.3 The same reference says gait speed is most valid and reliable among adults aged 65 and over, is a reliable predictor of potential hospitalization and decline in function, and that women tend to walk more slowly than men, especially at older ages.3
Several large earlier studies point in the same direction as the new one:
- A 2011 pooled analysis in JAMA. Researchers led by Stephanie Studenski of the University of Pittsburgh combined data from 9 studies covering 34,485 adults aged 65 or older, followed for 6 to 21 years.4 Faster walking was linked to longer survival at all ages in both sexes, and was especially informative after age 75. Speeds of 1.0 meter per second (about 3.3 feet per second) or higher consistently went with survival longer than expected by age and sex alone.4
- A 2017 UK Biobank study. Using data on 420,727 middle-aged people in the UK, a Leicester team found that people who described themselves as slow walkers were around twice as likely to have a heart-related death as brisk walkers, over about 6.3 years.5 That study relied on people’s own reports of their pace rather than a timed test.5
- A 2018 analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Researchers looked at 11 studies from England and Scotland with more than 50,200 participants who reported how fast they walked. An average pace was linked to about a fifth lower risk of death overall, and a brisk or fast pace to almost a quarter lower, with no clear link to cancer deaths.6
The new study adds two things that most of this earlier work lacked: a timed test and nine days of wrist-tracker data on everyday walking, in the same group of older adults.1 Self-reports, as used in the 2017 and 2018 studies, depend on how people judge their own pace.56
Experts have long been careful about what these links mean. In an editorial alongside the 2011 JAMA study, Matteo Cesari of the Universita Campus Bio-Medico in Rome wrote that no evidence definitively showed that improving gait speed leads to better health outcomes, and that it should not yet be a primary target for treatment.4 In 2018, Philippa Hobson of the British Heart Foundation told Newsweek that “we can’t prove you can walk your way to a longer life.”6
What to watch next
The open question is the same one that has followed this research for more than a decade: whether walking speed is mainly a mirror of overall health or something that, if changed, changes outcomes. Answering that would take studies that deliberately help some people walk faster and compare them with others over years, which the new study did not do.24
Other things to watch for include the full paper’s numbers on how much lower the risk was for faster walkers, whether the wrist-tracker measure predicts risk better than a short timed test, and whether the results hold in groups that are less healthy or more diverse than this UK sample.2
For now, the new study adds another long-term data point to the idea, raised in earlier work, that a few seconds with a stopwatch may tell clinicians something useful about an older person’s overall health.41
