Living in a Walkable Neighborhood Could Cut Your Risk of Heart Disease

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the number one cause of death in the U.S. An easy way to help lower your risk is to get the recommended 150 minutes of physical activity per week.

Although these recommendations are well known, more than a quarter of all adults don’t meet this goal. So, how can you get more heart-healthy exercise? According to research from a study published in Environmental Research and presented at the scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology, living in a walkable neighborhood will do the trick. Walking Towards Heart Health The research team from the Netherlands spent 11 years monitoring the Dutch population, analyzing a subset of data from Statistics Netherlands.



Researchers focused on adults who were 40 years of age or older at the beginning of the study and who did not have a previous history of CVD. They also only included data from those people who did not move to another neighborhood after the study’s start. Of all of the participants included, 21.

4 percent of individuals developed CVD within 11 years, and 81,600 people died due to their CVD. This data was collected from the Dutch Hospital Discharge Register and the National Cause of Death Register. Compared to those people who lived in a consistently walkable neighborhood, those living in neighborhoods with low walkability had a 5.

1 percent higher risk of developing any type of CVD. Those who lived in a neighborhood where the walkability increased over time had a slightly lower risk of developing CVD, at 4.9 percent.

Unfortunately, individuals living in the least walkable neighborhoods made up the largest portion of the studied population, leaving a high percentage, 91 percent, prone to CVD and CVD-related death. Read More: Walking vs. Running Benefits: Should You Walk or Run for Exercise? What Makes a Walkable Neighborhood? Neighborhood walkability is a measurement of environmental characteristics that make walking an easy and accessible mode of transport.

These can include things like how many people live in the area, if there is a good mix of residential, industrial, and commercial land use, and the availability of sidewalks. For this study, researchers measured walkability within a 1600-foot radius around people’s home addresses using six characteristics: population density, retail and service density, land use mix, intersection density, green space density , and sidewalk density. After mapping the characteristics, they classified all areas into four different types of walkable neighborhoods.

The groups that showed the lowest risk of developing CVD lived in neighborhoods that scored high on all six characteristics consistently through the 11-year observation period. The highest-risk and largest population group lived in neighborhoods that scored low on the six characteristics during that same time period. A Surprising Conclusion The other two types of neighborhood classifications are ones that started off scoring low but received better scores as the years went on and ones that went in the reverse direction, with the walkability measurements getting worse over time.

Surprisingly, the research team found that even those whose neighborhood increased their walkability over time did not see a significantly lower risk for CVD. This result could be because the neighborhood remained less walkable for a longer period of the observed years. Alternatively, it could be evidence that living in a neighborhood with low walkability allows us to develop sedentary habits, like driving instead of walking to work or the corner store, and that these habits are hard to break even if our neighborhood becomes more walkable over time.

Either way, this final result highlights how important it is for neighborhoods to be walkable from their construction and that urban planners should consider the cardiovascular health of the population. In a press release , Erik Timmermans, from the University Medical Center Utrecht, said, “[Neighborhoods] designed to be walkable may help residents to choose active transportation, such as commute walking, rather than sedentary modes of travel like driving, and allow increased physical activity to be incorporated into daily life.” This article is not offering medical advice and should be used for informational purposes only.

Read More : It Doesn't Matter What Time You Exercise As Long As You Get Moving Article Sources Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article: Environmental Research.

Changes in neighbourhood walkability and incident CVD: A population-based cohort study of three million adults covering 24 years As the marketing coordinator at Discover Magazine, Stephanie Edwards interacts with readers across Discover's social media channels and writes digital content. Offline, she is a contract lecturer in English & Cultural Studies at Lakehead University, teaching courses on everything from professional communication to Taylor Swift, and received her graduate degrees in the same department from McMaster University. You can find more of her science writing in Lab Manager and her short fiction in anthologies and literary magazine across the horror genre.

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