Walk at 3mph or more to avoid the 'Grim Reaper'
Friday December 16th, 2011
If you are a man over 70 and want to elude the Grim Reaper, you have to walk at a speed of at least three miles an hour.
A
study in the quirky Christmas issue of The British Medical Journal Online
claims to have estimated – for the first time – the speed
at which the 'Grim Reaper' usually walks: about 1.8 miles per hour. He
never walked faster than three miles per hour.
A team of researchers at Concord Hospital in Sydney, Australia, analysed the walking patterns of 1,705 men aged 70 and over who were participating in The Concord Health and Ageing in Men Project (CHAMP). The men lived in the inner city and suburbs of Sydney and they were recruited from January 2005 to June 2007.
The researchers assessed participants’ walking speed at baseline and survival over the five-year study period.
The results show that their average walking speed was 0.88 metres per second (m/s). No men with walking speeds of 1.36 m/s (3mph or 5km per hour) or above had contact with the 'Grim Reaper'. A total of 266 deaths were observed during the follow-up.
The authors conclude that the results support their theory that “faster speeds are protective against mortality because fast walkers can maintain a safe distance from the Grim Reaper”.
Other reports in the Christmas edition show that overall mortality rate in Ambridge – the fictitious village in the BBC Radio 4 series The Archers – is slightly lower than the country as a whole.
Author Rob Stepney found of the 15 deaths recorded in Ambridge over the 20 years, nine were of male characters and six of female characters.
This equates to a death rate of 7.8 per 1,000 population per year for men compared with 8.5 per 1,000 in England and Wales mid-way through the study period. For women in Ambridge, the mortality rate was 5.2 deaths per 1,000 compared with 5.8 per 1,000 nationally.
* Another report in the Christmas edition reveals that doctors in Manchester spotted Addisonian crisis – a rare condition – in a football fan after hearing about suffering unusual symptoms while watching her team Manchester United play.
* Finally, researchers argue that Irish novelist and poet, James Joyce, was probably long-sighted (hyperopic) rather than short-sighted (myopic). They say the thick convex lenses in photographs of Joyce and the positive lenses in a 1932 prescription for his glasses "establishes the fact of Joyce’s hyperopia”.
British Medical Journal December 16 2011
Tags: Australia | Fitness | General Health | UK News
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