TOKYO: A Japanese research group has claimed that walking 8,000 steps per day every weekend can decrease the death risk.
According to the group, which included Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Medicine, people who regularly walked at least 8,000 steps on one or two days per week saw a drop in death risk after ten years that was roughly equal to that among people who walked the same amount three to seven days per week.
Last month, the study was published in the JAMA Network Open Medical Journal of the American Medical Association.
Previous research has shown that walking 8,000 steps or more daily can reduce the risk of death. But it needed to be clarified how the risk may vary depending on the number of days spent walking that many steps.
The researchers examined the association between the number of daily steps taken by 3,101 adults aged 20 and older, with an average age of 50.5, and the risk of death ten years later using data from a U.S. national health survey conducted between 2005 and 2006.
The three-to-seven-day group recorded a mortality rate of 16.5 percent, lower than that for the zero-day group. In contrast, the rate for the one-or-two-day group was 14.9 percent among individuals who walked at least 8,000 steps per day on zero days, one or two days, and three to seven days.
The rate was 8.4% lower for the three-to-seven-day group and 8.1% lower for the one- or two-day group when the research team restricted the cause of death to conditions affecting the heart and blood vessels. — APP
