THE ARISING · Longevity & Healthspan
Faster Everyday Walking Pace Linked to Lower Death Risk in Older Adults
How quickly someone walks down the street may say something about how long they will live. A large study of older British adults found that faster walking, measured in two different ways, was linked to a lower risk of death over nearly 12 years.
The research, published in JAMA Network Open in 2026, is an observational study in people. It drew on the Whitehall II cohort in the UK and included 4,067 participants with an average age of 69.3. About three in four were men. Baseline measurements were taken in 2012 and 2013, and deaths were tracked through August 2024 using the British national mortality register.
Walking pace was captured in two ways. First, a nurse timed each participant over a 2.44-metre course. They were asked to walk at their usual pace, as if walking down the street to the shops. The test was done three times and the average was used. Second, participants wore an accelerometer on the wrist for nine days. From that data, researchers worked out walking cadence: the number of steps taken per minute of walking.
The researchers used two cadence measures. One was the median cadence, a typical walking pace. The other was the 95th percentile cadence, which reflects the fastest walking someone does in daily life. Participants averaged 75.3 steps per minute at the median and 112.2 steps per minute at the 95th percentile. Average clinical walking speed was 1.2 metres per second.
During a median follow-up of 11.8 years, 739 participants (18.2%) died. After accounting for age, sex, education, ethnicity, marital status, smoking, alcohol, fruit and vegetable intake, body mass index, blood pressure, cholesterol, daily living limitations and chronic disease, all three measures were linked to lower risk of death. The figures are per one standard deviation higher, a standard statistical step of difference between people.
For clinical walking speed, the hazard ratio was 0.77 (95% confidence interval 0.71 to 0.84). For median cadence it was 0.83 (0.77 to 0.90), and for 95th percentile cadence 0.82 (0.75 to 0.89). A hazard ratio below 1 means a lower rate of death. The patterns were similar in women and men.
The three measures also performed about equally well at telling apart people who died from those who did not. The study used a score called the C index for this, where 0.5 is chance and 1 is perfect. Clinical walking speed scored 0.747, median cadence 0.744 and 95th percentile cadence 0.745. Only clinical walking speed improved the discriminative ability of a model that already included the standard risk factors.
The two kinds of measurement were not closely tied together. Correlations between the clinic test and the wrist-based cadence measures were weak, at 0.28 for median cadence and 0.27 for 95th percentile cadence. The authors conclude that both can be used in population studies, and that the choice may depend on research goals and practical constraints.
The study tracked who walked faster and who died, and did not test whether speeding up changes lifespan. Its sample was also healthier than the wider group of Whitehall II participants who took part in the 2012 to 2013 wave of data collection.