This daily physical activity can reveal your brain's aging

It may seem insignificant, but as soon as you can walk from A to B, it can reveal much about the internal functioning of your body and mind. Research has shown that the speed at which you walk toward shops, local park, or bus station may predict your chances of hospitalization, heart attack, and even death. In fact, the speed of one's walking can also be used to reveal the degree of their cognitive aging.

The walking speed test is a way to assess someone's functional capacity to carry out day - to - day tasks at home and maintain independence. It may also reveal how weak a person is and predict how well rehabilitation will respond after a blow.

While it is normal for people to slow down as they age, a sharp drop in one's walking speed may indicate that something more serious is happening.

When the normal pace of walking a person falls, it is often accompanied by a decline in health”, says Christina Dieli-Conwright, medical professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who studies the effects of exercise on cancer prognosis.

“It could happen that the person has a chronic condition that means they haven't moved so much or have become seated. This means that, more than possible, they have experienced a decline in muscle strength and the mobility of joints, which unfortunately leads to further health decline,” says Dieli-Conwright.

A Simple Technique

To conduct the speed test of walking, all you need is a chronometer and a way to measure distance, such as a tape meter. There are two common versions.

If you're out there and you have plenty of space, you can try your 10m speed test. First, measure 5m (16.5 feet), followed by another 10m. To begin with, it is recommended that you walk 5 feet [5 m] to reach your normal speed, then walk at your normal pace for 30 feet [10 m]. To calculate your walking speed, just divide 10 meters by the number of seconds it took to walk that distance.

If you are at home and space is more limited, you can test walking speeds of 4 m (13.2 feet). With this test, weigh 1m (3.3ft), followed by 4m. The idea is to use the first counter to speed up, then the time it takes to walk 4 meters at your usual pace. To determine your speed, share four meters with the number of seconds you needed to walk that distance.

Otherwise, there are many apps you can use to measure your speed of walking, including training trackers like Walker, MapMyWalk, Strava and Google Fit, which use GPS to track your distance and time, allowing them to calculate your speed.

Studies have shown that walking speed is an important predictor of life expectancy among the elderly. For example, researchers at Pittsburgh University brought together the results of nine studies that collectively tracked more than 34,000 adults living in the community aged 65 and older, aged six to 21. The study showed that walking speed was significantly linked to life expectancy. For example, men with the slowest speed of walking at 75 years of age had 19% chances of living for 10 years, compared to men with the fastest walking speed they had 87% chances of surviving.

One explanation is that people who are already not well tend to be less mobile. However, a 2009 study in France revealed that even among healthy adults over 65 years of age, slow walking participants were about three times more likely to die of cardiovascular disease during the study period compared with the faster people.

“The action looks like such a simple thing that most of us don't think of it, we just do it”, says Line Rasmussen, a senior researcher at the Psychological and Neuroscence Department at Duke University, North Carolina.

But walking actually relies on many different systems of body working together: your bones and muscles hold you and move you, your eyes help you see where you're going, your heart and your lungs flow blood and oxygen and your brain and your nerves co-ordinate all”, Rasmussen adds.

According to Rasmussen, as we grow older, the function of these systems begins to slow down and a slower speed of walking can reflect this overall decline and be a sign of advanced aging.

This is not limited to older adults. In a 2019 study, Rasmussen and colleagues found that even among 45-year-olds, the speed of walking could predict the degree by which the brain and their body age.

What surprised me the most was finding a connection between the speed of walking people at 45 years of age and their cognitive skills until early childhood, Line Rasmussen

Rasmussen and researchers at University receiving 904 people aged 45 who were part of the Multidisciplinary Health and Development Research Dunedin, a project that has followed the lives of over 1,000 born between 1972 and 1973 in Dunedin, New Zealand. Individuals in the group have been regularly praised for the health and recognition function throughout their lifetime.

I was surprised by how much change there was in the speed of walking among people who were all of the same age,” says Rasmussen. “You can expect everyone at 45 to be somewhere in the middle, but some walk as fast as healthy 20-year-olds, while others walk slowly as older adults”, she says.

The study found that 45-year-olds with slower pace speed showed signs of accelerated “aging, with lungs, teeth and less shaped immune system compared to those who walked faster. They also had cybermarketers linked to a faster rate of aging, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and lower heart pressure. It was found that the slow walkers had other signs of poor physical health, such as the weaker hand grasp force and more difficulty in getting up from a chair. (Read more from the BBC about the test for your chances of living up to 100 and the test that reveals how well you are getting older. )

Rasmussen and colleagues also found that those who walked slowly showed signs of advanced cognitive aging. For example, they tend to get lower results on IQ tests in general, performing worse on memory tests, processing speed, reasoning and other cognitive functions.

MRI scans also showed that this cognitive deterioration was accompanied by visible changes in the participants' brains. The slowest walkers had a smaller brain, a smaller neokotrex, the smallest layer of brain, which controls higher thinking and processing of information and more white matter. In an intriguing way, the faces of the slow pedestrians were also appreciated as aging at a faster pace than other participants.