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TOPLINE:

Among adults who take 8000 steps or fewer per day, those who accumulated steps during bouts of 15 minutes or more had a lower risk of dying over 9.5 years of follow-up than did those whose steps occurred during shorter windows of activity.

METHODOLOGY:

• Researchers conducted a prospective cohort study using UK Biobank data (2013-2015) involving 33,560 participants (mean age, 62 years) who accumulated no more than 8000 steps per day and were free of cardiovascular disease or cancer at baseline.
• Participants were categorized based on their predominant pattern of accumulating steps: bouts shorter than 5 minutes, 5 to less than 10 minutes, 10 to less than 15 minutes, or 15 minutes or longer.
• The researchers used inverse probability weighting to balance covariates across bout duration groups.

TAKEAWAY:

• Cumulative all-cause mortality at 9.5 years decreased with greater bout length, from 4.36% (95% CI, 3.52%-5.19%) for participants with walking bouts under 5 minutes to 0.80% (95% CI, 0.00%-1.89%) for those with bouts of 15 minutes or longer.
• The incidence of cardiovascular disease showed similar patterns, declining from 13.03% among participants with the shortest bouts to 4.39% for those whose bouts lasted at least 15 minutes.
• Among sedentary participants — those with fewer than 5000 steps per day — the reduction in mortality was most pronounced, with risk for death during the study period decreasing from 5.13% to 0.86% for the groups with the shortest and longest bouts, respectively.

IN PRACTICE:

“Given that most daily steps in our sample consisted of light- to moderate-intensity activity, it is plausible that only the longer bouts accumulated sufficient volume and continuity to engage cardiometabolic physiologic pathways,” the researchers reported.

“Sedentary adults are a high-risk, hard-to-reach population often excluded from structured exercise programs. Yet, this study suggests that they stand to gain the most from lengthening walking bouts,” according to the authors of an editorial accompanying the journal article. “Health promotion campaigns, digital apps, and insurer well-ness programs could readily integrate ‘bout goals’ alongside traditional step targets with current wear-able technology capable of tracking bout duration.”

SOURCE:

The study was led by Borja del Pozo Cruz, PhD, of Universidad Europea de Madrid in Spain, and Matthew Ahmadi, PhD, of the University of Sydney in Australia. It was published online on October 27 in Annals of Internal Medicine.

LIMITATIONS:

The findings “are observational and should be interpreted with caution,” according to the researchers. Fragmented activity may reflect health limitations that were not otherwise captured in the study. Physical activity was measured once during the study period, which may not fully represent long-term activity patterns.

DISCLOSURES:

The study was supported by the National Heart Foundation and the National Health and Medical Research Council.

This article was created using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.