Blood pressure, weight and cholesterol are considered the top measures for predicting a person’s overall health and how long they may live.
These metrics can show how much stress essential organs like the heart are under on a day-to-day basis, but improving them can take months or years of dieting, exercise and medication. They also fluctuate and can be difficult to track.
However, scientists in the UK have identified simpler measures that could signal how long you have left to live.
In a new study, 400,000 adults were divided into four groups based on their lifestyle habits, body mass index (BMI), cholesterol, blood pressure, age and death status.
Along with standard health metrics, the researchers looked at five less common measures: handgrip strength, leisure-time physical activity, resting heart rate, sleep duration and walking pace.
They aimed to improve risk of mortality classification, which estimates the likelihood of a person dying in the hospital, as well as net reclassification index (NRI), a metric that measures how many people are correctly reclassified into higher or lower risk categories.
The team found that replacing blood pressure and cholesterol metrics with the five new measures improved mortality risk classification by 10 percent for women and 19 percent for men.
And among the new measures, walking speed was the ‘strongest predictor of death.’ When replacing cholesterol and blood pressure, NRI improved 11 percent for women and 14 percent for men.
Researchers found walking speed predicted the risk of death better than blood pressure or cholesterol (stock image)
The team suggested walking speed can measure several factors behind mortality risk, including heart health, muscle strength, neurological function and level of frailty.
They noted the findings could improve predictions about a person’s risk of death, helping to treat health issues sooner and potentially improve lifespan.
‘Our analysis found that walking pace was the strongest single predictor of death,’ Professor Tom Yates, paper author and physical activity researcher at the University of Leicester in the UK, said.
‘In people with existing health conditions, replacing blood pressure and cholesterol measurement with self-reported walking pace improved the model’s ability to predict mortality, meaning people were reclassified into a more-appropriate risk category.
‘When all five physical measures were combined, mortality prediction improved even further in groups with preexisting health conditions.’
The new study, published earlier this month in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, looked at 407,569 adults from the database UK Biobank ages 40 to 69. The average age was 58, and participants were followed for about 16 years.
Based on their age, sex and health status, they were divided into four groups: healthy women, unhealthy women, healthy men and unhealthy men. Participants with at least one of 131 common illnesses were considered ‘unhealthy.’
There were 336,023 people in the healthy group and 71,546 in the unhealthy group. The team reported 33,318 deaths.
When looking at walking speed, the team found slow walkers were more likely to have higher resting heart rates than brisk walkers, which signals increased stress on the heart. It was also associated with higher blood pressure and BMI.
‘Along with the potential for combining measures of physical behavior, function, and fitness to improve prognostic discrimination, this study also reported that [walking pace] was the strongest individual predictor of mortality, particularly in those with a prevalent health condition,’ the researchers wrote.
They also noted walking pace ‘significantly improving predictive performance and risk classification’ when used in place of blood pressure and cholesterol measures.
There were several limitations to consider, including using self-reported data, which is prone to bias, and the study making associations but not proving definitive relationships.
