Experts announced the ideal daily step: As people over 65 walk, their health expenditures decrease.

Increasing health expenditures and chronic disease burden as societies age, direct the medical and economic worlds to seek new solutions. A new large-scale study by researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan has proven for the first time the direct impact of daily steps on treatment costs with objective digital data and three-dimensional modeling. The study, which examined the health insurance and pedometer data of more than 20 thousand individuals, showed that walking turned into a savings and health shield, especially in older ages.

In the study, details of which were shared in the SSM—Population Health magazine, three-year data of 20,950 long-term mobile health application users over the age of 40 were analyzed. Analyzes revealed that the effect of walking on reducing health costs varies greatly according to age groups.

While the impact of daily steps on treatment costs remained relatively flat in the middle age group between the ages of 40 and 64, the situation has completely changed in senior adults aged 65 and over. It was determined that the health costs of individuals who walk less in the older age group peak, but as the number of daily steps increases, these costs decrease rapidly, as if falling off a cliff.

The most striking common finding of the research was that the cost decrease in all age groups stopped after a certain limit. It was determined that treatment costs decreased as the number of daily steps increased and stabilized at approximately 11 thousand steps per day.

According to the data, the decrease in health expenditures reaches its lowest level, plateauing at 11 thousand 317 steps in middle-aged adults and at 10 thousand 612 steps in individuals over 65 years of age. Experts state that walks above these step counts are beneficial for general health, but do not create an additional break in the cost reduction curve.

The leader of the research team, Assoc. Dr. Haruka Kato stated that the results obtained carry critical messages for public health policies. Emphasizing that even small increases in the daily step count of individuals in the older age group provide huge savings in treatment costs, Kato emphasized that encouraging the elderly population to walk within the scope of preventive medicine will alleviate the financial burden on healthcare systems.