University of Leicester walking pace study

University of Leicester researchers said on March 23 that walking pace was the strongest single physical measure they tested for predicting risk of death in a study of 407,569 UK Biobank participants. The analysis compared self-reported walking pace with handgrip strength, resting heart rate, sleep duration and leisure-time physical activity, and examined whether those measures improved standard mortality-risk models. The university said the findings were especially strong among people already living with long-term health conditions. The work has been published in *Mayo Clinic Proceedings*. The Leicester team said the result drew attention because walking pace is simple to collect. In its summary of the study, the university said replacing blood pressure and cholesterol measurements with self-reported walking pace improved mortality prediction in people with existing health conditions. NewsBytes reported the study on May 18, describing walking pace as outperforming handgrip strength, heart rate, sleep habits and leisure activity as a signal of lifespan. ### How big was the Leicester study, and what exactly did it compare? The University of Leicester said researchers analyzed data from 407,569 UK adults in the UK Biobank. The five physical measures assessed were walking pace, handgrip strength, resting heart rate, sleep duration and leisure-time physical activity, according to the university’s March 23 release. The study asked whether those basic measures could enhance or replace traditional clinical predictors such as blood pressure and cholesterol when estimating premature-death risk. A related 2019 Leicester analysis of UK Biobank data found similar results in a smaller cohort of 298,829 adults free of cancer and cardiovascular disease at baseline. That study concluded that self-reported walking pace was the only lifestyle variable that consistently improved prediction of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality when added to established risk factors. ### Why did walking pace stand out over other measures? Professor Tom Yates of the University of Leicester said in the university release that walking pace was the “strongest single predictor of death” among the physical measures studied. The release said that, in people with existing health conditions, using self-reported walking pace in place of blood pressure and cholesterol improved the model’s ability to classify people into more appropriate risk categories. Yuhe Wang, a PhD researcher at Leicester, said risk-prediction models are used in clinical practice, public health and the insurance sector. Wang said such scores help clinicians make personalized decisions and help public-health officials identify groups that may benefit from preventive interventions. ### Does this mean walking pace is better than a lab test? The University of Leicester said the finding applied to risk prediction, not diagnosis. Its release said simple physical-behavior and fitness measures could offer a “quick and cost effective” way to identify people at higher risk of death, particularly where long-term conditions are already present. The 2019 Leicester paper framed the result similarly. That study compared walking pace against established cardiovascular-risk variables and found that other lifestyle factors did not consistently improve discrimination across models and outcomes, while walking pace did. ### How does this fit with other evidence on exercise and healthy aging? A 2012 *JAMA Internal Medicine* study followed 18,670 healthy middle-aged adults and found higher midlife fitness was associated with a lower risk of developing chronic conditions over a median 26 years of follow-up. The study reported lower incidence of chronic conditions in the highest fitness quintile than in the lowest for both men and women, and said the results suggested “compression of morbidity” in older age. That older study is not the same as the Leicester paper, but it points in the same direction: basic measures tied to fitness in midlife are associated with longer periods lived without major disease. Newser’s recent coverage described a separate report on nearly 25,000 adults in similar terms, though the Leicester study itself focused on walking pace and mortality-risk prediction. ### What should readers watch for next? *Mayo Clinic Proceedings* is the publication listed by the University of Leicester for the March 23 study, and the university release names Yuhe Wang and Professor Tom Yates among the researchers quoted. The earlier Leicester prognostic study, authored by Stavroula Argyridou, Francesco Zaccardi, Melanie J. Davies, Kamlesh Khunti and Yates, remains available through the university’s research archive.