Your daily step count may say more about your health than you think.
On Monday, at the Annual Meeting of the American Neurological Association, researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine presented a study on the topic. They found that adults who averaged fewer than 5,000 steps a day were later diagnosed with dementia, Parkinson’s disease, or stroke at almost twice the rate of those who averaged more than 12,000 steps.
The study looked at a year of Fitbit data from 22,517 adults ages 40 and older enrolled in the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program. The participants were sorted into three groups: a low-activity group that walked roughly 4,800 steps a day, a moderate-activity group that walked 8,300 steps a day, and a high-activity group that walked 12,600 steps a day.
Low step counts were tied to more neurological diagnoses
The researchers followed participants’ health records for an average of five years. They found that 343 participants received a new neurological diagnosis. The low-activity group had the highest rate: roughly 3.8 new diagnoses for every 1,000 people. In comparison, the moderate-activity group had 2.7 new diagnoses for every 1,000 people, and the high-activity group saw 2.1 new diagnoses for every 1,000 people.
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The step count alone didn’t explain the difference
While the findings suggest that less active participants were diagnosed at higher rates, much of that relationship was attributable to other conditions such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and depression.
“Low activity and conditions such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and depression are a package deal, part of a broader health picture,” Meet Popatbhai Kachhadia, MD, lead author of the study, said in a release.
The participants in the low-activity group also had a higher average body mass index, or BMI, and higher rates of diabetes, high blood pressure, and depression. When the researchers fully accounted for those conditions, the link between low activity and later diagnoses was no longer statistically significant.