Your Gait Can Predict Your Longevity
(From Oprah Magazine, September 2011)
Forget the “life line” on your palm and complicated medical algorithms. It turns out that forecasting how long you’ll live might be as simple as timing how fast you walk.
University of Pittsburgh researchers recently crunched data from nearly 35,000 subjects 65 years or older and discovered that each increase in gait speed of 0.1 meters/second correlated with a 12 percent decrease in the risk of death. Among women 75 to 84, for example, 92 percent of the fastest walkers (traveling at 1.4 meters/second or faster) lived another ten years, while only 35 percent of the slowest walkers (shuffling at 0.4 meters/second or slower) survived until then.
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