Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh pooled data from nine separate studies, covering more than 34,000 older adults, to see how well a simple timed walk predicted who would survive the years ahead.
Models that combined only age, sex, and walking speed predicted survival about as accurately as models using chronic disease history, smoking status, blood pressure, and body mass index together, and every 0.1 meter-per-second increase in walking speed was linked to about a 12 percent lower risk of death.
The finding helped establish gait speed as a quick clinical sign of overall health in older adults, cheap enough to measure in a hallway with a stopwatch. It summarizes risk rather than explaining it, since slow walking can reflect weak muscles, joint pain, heart or lung trouble, or several of those at once, and the pooled studies could not separate those underlying causes from one another.
Read the original study
Studenski et al., JAMA, 2011 · doi.org/10.1001/jama.2010.1923
A timed walk, worth a page of tests.
Source
- Studenski, S., Perera, S., Patel, K., Rosano, C., Faulkner, K., Inzitari, M., Brach, J., Chandler, J., Cawthon, P., Connor, E. B., Nevitt, M., Visser, M., Kritchevsky, S., Badinelli, S., Harris, T., Newman, A. B., Cauley, J., Ferrucci, L., & Guralnik, J. (2011). Gait speed and survival in older adults. JAMA, 305(1), 50–8. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2010.1923