Older persons with hypertension can considerably lower their blood pressure by walking an additional 3,000 steps each day.
In the US, almost 80% of elderly persons have high blood pressure. Maintaining a healthy weight can help prevent heart failure, heart attacks, and strokes.
According to a university news release, Linda Pescatello, professor of kinesiology at the University of Connecticut, “If we live long enough, we’ll all develop high blood pressure.” That illustrates how common it is.
This new study sought to determine whether moderately increasing walking, which is popular in this age range, might have the same effect on blood pressure since her prior work had demonstrated that exercise could have both an immediate and long-lasting effect.
According to co-author Duck-Chul Lee, a professor of kinesiology at Iowa State University, “It’s simple to do, they don’t need any equipment, and they can do it anywhere at almost any time.”
The study’s focus was on a group of sedentary adults aged 68 to 78 who took roughly 4,000 daily steps. They may log 7,000 daily steps by adding an extra 3,000, which is in accordance with the American College of Sports Medicine’s advice.
According to Lee in the release, achieving 3,000 steps “is large enough but not too challenging to achieve for health benefits.”
To track their progress, participants were given kits that included pedometers, blood pressure monitors, and step diaries.
After the intervention, participants’ systolic and diastolic blood pressure reduced on average by 7 and 4 points, respectively.
The pressure against artery walls when the heart beats is called systolic, and the pressure in between heartbeats is called diastolic. Systolic is the top number in a blood pressure reading.
According to other research, reductions of this size are associated with relative decreases of 11% in the risk of premature mortality from all causes and 16% from heart-related causes, an 18% reduction in the risk of heart disease, and a 36% reduction in the risk of stroke.
It’s exciting, according to the study’s first author Elizabeth Lefferts of Iowa State University’s Department of Kinesiology, “that a straightforward lifestyle intervention can be just as effective as structured exercise and some medications.”
The effects would be comparable to those of blood pressure medication decreases.
Even eight of the participants who were already taking medication for high blood pressure observed improvements in their systolic blood pressure by increasing their daily activity.
In a prior study, we discovered that exercise enhances the effectiveness of blood pressure medicine alone, according to Pescatello. “It basically illustrates how beneficial exercise is as an anti-hypertensive treatment. It is not intended to diminish the benefits of medication in any way, but rather to add to the therapy options.
Increasing total steps was more important than walking at a certain pace or for a certain amount of time.
The amount of physical exercise, not the intensity, is what matters most in this case, according to Pescatello. “With the volume as an aim, anything that fits in and anything that works conveys health benefits.