- Increasing daily step counts and walking faster may reduce risk of cardiovascular events in people with hypertension, a recent study has found.
- Walking more than 3,000 steps each day reduced risk of major adverse cardiovascular events by 17%.
- The benefits of walking also reduced risk of cardiovascular events in people without hypertension.
Taking more steps reduces the risk of major adverse cardiovascular events in people with hypertension.
Research published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology found that taking extra steps every day as well as walking faster reduced risk of heart attack, heart failure, and stroke.
Emmanuel Stamatakis, PhD, director of the Mackenzie Wearables Research Hub at the University of Sydney, Australia, who supervised the study, said in a press statement that:
“This study is one of the first to demonstrate a dose-response relationship between daily step count and major problems of the heart and blood vessels. In a nutshell, we found that, if you live with high blood pressure, the more you walk with greater intensity, the lower your risk for future serious cardiovascular events. These findings support the message that any amount of physical activity is beneficial, even below the widely recommended daily target of 10,000 steps.”
As part of their study, the researchers examined data from more than 32,000 people who were enrolled in the UK Biobank database. The participants had a diagnosis of high blood pressure.
They wore accelerometers on their wrist for a week to measure how fast and how far they walked.
The researchers found that compared with a daily step count of 2,300 steps, taking more than 3,000 steps each day and taking regular walks at higher speed was associated with a 17% reduction in risk of major cardiac events in people with high blood pressure.
For every extra 1,000 steps taken daily, there was a 22% reduction in risk of heart failure, a 24% reduction in risk of stroke and a 9% reduction in risk of heart attack.
“Our findings offer patients accessible and measurable targets for heart health, even below 10,000 steps daily. Clinicians should promote physical activity as standard care, especially in patients with high blood pressure. Our results can inform new, tailored public health recommendations for these patients. Future recommendations on walking in people with high blood pressure could consider promoting higher stepping intensity,” Stamatakis said in the press statement.
The study adds to a growing body of research that demonstrates any amount of exercise can be beneficial to improving cardiovascular health.
Cheng-Han Chen, MD, a board-certified interventional cardiologist and medical director of the Structural Heart Program at MemorialCare Saddleback Medical Center in Laguna Hills, CA, not involved int his research, told Medical News Today that:
“These results are significant in that they demonstrate a very clear dose-response relationship between walking and improvements in cardiovascular risk, even at low levels of walking. They indicate that even some physical activity is better than none, and that more is probably even better.”
The study also concluded that taking any additional steps over 10 thousand a day was associated with additional benefits in reducing the risk of stroke.
According to Carl J. Lavie Jr., MD, Medical Director of Cardiac Rehabilitation and Preventive Cardiology at the John Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute, walking has many advantages for improving health.
“The benefits are numerous including improving autonomic function (the balance between vagal and sympathetic systems), improving cardiometabolic profiles, including metabolic syndrome and diabetes, reducing inflammation, and reducing psychological stress,” Lavie, who was likewise not involved in this study, said.
“One of the most important things that physical activity does to improve prognosis is improving levels of cardiorespiratory fitness. Higher intensity walking or exercise (e.g. faster steps, running etc) improves fitness even more, but compared to being totally sedentary, some steps improves fitness at least a little and moderate steps probably gets people out of the very low fitness categories,” he explained.
The researchers also found a benefit of increased steps among those who do not have high blood pressure. They examined data from just over 37,000 people without hypertension and found that an extra 1,000 steps daily led to a 20.2% lower risk of major adverse cardiovascular events, 23.2% lower risk of heart failure, 17.9% lower myocardial infarction (heart attack) risk, and 24.6% lower risk of stroke.
Parveen Garg, MD, cardiologist with Keck Medicine USC, says that movement is the priority and that the number of steps taken does not necessarily need to be the focus.
“I tell my patients, ‘look, let’s not get hung up on this 10,000 number’… If we just focus on that as the threshold, then a lot of people are going to feel like they failed, and they may not walk much at all,” Garg said.
“So if we change that message to ‘any walking is beneficial,’ that’s a much more positive message to our patients,” he advidsed.
