Getting Up To 10,000 Steps A Day May Reduce Risks For Cancer, Heart Disease, and Early Death, a Study Suggests
CNN (9/12, LaMotte) reports “getting up to 10,000 steps a day” may reduce the “risk for cancer, heart disease, and early death...but any amount of walking helps, according to a” study that “followed 78,500 people between the ages of 40 and 79 from England, Scotland, and Wales who wore wrist step counters for 24 hours a day over a seven-day stretch.” The study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that “health benefits rose with every step...but peaked at 10,000 steps – after that, the effects faded.” American College of Cardiology Nutrition & Lifestyle Work Group Founder and Co-Chair Andrew Freeman, MD, FACC, FACP, who was not involved in the study, said, “By and large, I think the study is well done, and it certainly continues to add to the foundation of knowledge that tells us exercise is good stuff.”
Deaths related to heart failure (HF) have decreased from 1999 to 2012 and are again on the rise among US adults ages 75 and older, according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data spanning two decades.
Mortality was higher in men than women and highest among non-Hispanic white adults versus other racial/ethnic groups overall between 1999 and 2019.
Researcher Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, MD (Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC), pointed out to TCTMD that the results stand in contrast to earlier findings in adult patients under age 45. In the younger group, Khan and colleagues found Black patients had not only the highest HF mortality but also the sharpest increase in risk over the years.
“Among the younger patients with HF, the proportion of Black individuals that I see in my clinical practice is very high compared to the older populations,” where prevalence is much more spread out among various racial/ethnic groups, said Khan.
It may be that many Black patients susceptible to dying of HF are doing so before they reach the age of 75, which would translate into a higher prevalence of white patients above that cutoff, he explained. “I think [the pattern] might be due to survival bias that we’re seeing.”
For him, the biggest takeaway from the mortality trends in the over-75 group is that “it’s imperative that we start them on updated [guideline-directed medical therapy] to the maximal possible dose and all the foundational therapies for heart failure,” Khan said. He cautioned against “clinical inertia” and urged against taking the perspective of: “Don’t rock the boat . . . because they’re older patients, they’re frail patients, they have a lot of comorbidities.”
Led by Tariq Jamal Siddiqi, MD (University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson), the paper was published this week in JACC: Heart Failure.