<\/div>\n
Related article<\/span> How to recognize signs of a stroke with the acronym BE FAST<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe great thing about walking is that it is accessible to everyone,\u201d said senior study author Dr. Jill Pell, the Henry Mechan Professor of Public Health at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, via email. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to spend money going to a gym or buying equipment. You can just walk out of your front door and keep going.\u201d <\/strong> <\/p>\n Nearly 60 million people worldwide have atrial fibrillation, according to a 2024 study. Estimates of people with other arrhythmias are less conclusive, but in general, people with arrhythmias are at higher risk of having heart attacks or strokes and dying early, Pell said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere are medicines and procedures that can be offered to these people but it would be preferable to prevent heart rhythm abnormalities from occurring in the first place,\u201d Pell added. <\/p>\n
Additionally, to the authors\u2019 knowledge, there has been only one previous study on walking pace and heart rhythm abnormalities, and it focused on just one type of arrhythmia, Pell said. And past research has indicated that \u201cwalking pace is linked to other outcomes such as cardiovascular disease, so we wanted to see if the same was true of heart rhythm abnormalities,\u201d Pell said. <\/p>\n
The authors studied health and activity data from adults who had been recruited between 2006 and 2010 for the UK Biobank study, which has followed the health outcomes of more than 500,000 people between the ages 40 and 69 in the United Kingdom. Participants answered questionnaires that asked whether their walking pace was slow (less than 3 miles or 4.8 kilometers per hour), average (3 to 4 miles or 4.8 to 6.4 kilometers per hour) or brisk (more than 4 miles or 6.4 kilometers per hour). <\/p>\n
During a follow-up period of 13 years on average, 9% of participants developed arrhythmias. <\/p>\n
\n
<\/div>\n
Related article<\/span> Diet drinks may boost risk of dangerous heart condition by 20%, study says<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe had data on self-reported walking pace from more than 420,000 people but we also had accelerometry data on (nearly) 82,000 of these,\u201d Pell said, referring to data from watches that track movement speed. \u201cThe data from the watches showed that walking at an average pace (3-4 miles per hour) for only 5-15 minutes per day was sufficient to reduce your risk.\u201d <\/p>\n
The associations were strongest among people under 60, people without obesity, those with high blood pressure or two or more preexisting conditions, and women, the authors found. <\/s> <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an interesting finding because, although women are less likely to get atrial fibrillation than men, when they do get it they are at a higher risk of going on to get heart attacks and strokes than men with atrial fibrillation,\u201d Pell said. <\/p>\n
Cardiologist Dr. Martha Gulati found the study important and said it confirms earlier related research \u2014 by herself and others \u2014 that showed benefits of physical activity for atrial fibrillation and stronger associations among women. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis shows that one of the primary prevention strategies to reduce cardiac arrhythmias is brisk walking,\u201d added Gulati, director of preventive cardiology at the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Gulati wasn\u2019t involved in the research. <\/p>\n
The relationship between walking and heart speeds<\/h2>\n
Since the study is observational, it doesn\u2019t prove a cause and effect, the authors said. Self-reported health data is also vulnerable to inaccurate recollections or biases. <\/p>\n
In observational studies, there\u2019s always a risk that people who walk slower do so because they already have disease, Pell said. <\/p>\n
\n
<\/div>\n
Related article<\/span> Why \u2018cardiac clearance\u2019 could save your life<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe did everything possible to avoid this by making sure that no one had any type of heart or vascular disease at the beginning of the study,\u201d she added. \u201cHowever, we really need an intervention study now to confirm our findings: a study of people who walk slowly in which some are asked to increase their walking pace and some are not,\u201d Pell said. <\/p>\n
A-Fib is associated with multiple risk factors that are also linked with conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, said Dr. Sean Heffron, director of cardiovascular fitness and nutrition at the Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease at New York University. He was not involved in the study. <\/p>\n
Participants who walked faster were more likely to be men, live in less deprived areas, have healthier lifestyles and weigh less. They also had better grip strength, smaller waists and lower levels of inflammation and metabolic risk factors such as high cholesterol or blood sugar. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnd bradyarrhythmias or ventricular arrhythmias are nonspecific and can have lots of other causes and certainly are far less clearly associated with lifestyle-type factors than is atrial fibrillation,\u201d Heffron added. \u201cI feel like lumping them all together was interesting.\u201d <\/p>\n
The authors found that over one-third of the beneficial effect of a faster pace \u201cwas due to the fact that walking faster reduces cholesterol, glucose and blood pressure and makes you less likely to put on weight,\u201d Pell said, noting that those reductions lower your risk of heart rate abnormalities. <\/p>\n
\n
<\/div>\n
Related article<\/span> Getting older doesn\u2019t have to mean getting stiffer. 5 ways to keep mobile as you age<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Though a brisk pace seems to be better than a slow pace, \u201cthe first step is literally a step,\u201d Gulati said. \u201cWalking slow is how we start, but the more you do it, the faster your pace will become.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You may be able to lower your risk for developing heart rhythm abnormalities by speeding up your walking pace. That\u2019s according to a large new study published Tuesday in the journal Heart, which found average…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3296,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fitness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hiddenhealthysecrets.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hiddenhealthysecrets.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hiddenhealthysecrets.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hiddenhealthysecrets.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hiddenhealthysecrets.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hiddenhealthysecrets.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3295\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hiddenhealthysecrets.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hiddenhealthysecrets.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hiddenhealthysecrets.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hiddenhealthysecrets.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}