Walking 7,000 steps a day may be enough to significantly lower the risk of heart disease and other chronic illnesses, a global review of research has found, pointing to meaningful health gains well before the widely promoted 10,000-step target.

The review found that people who walk 7,000 steps daily had a 47 per cent lower risk of premature death from any cause and 25 to 38 per cent lower risks of cardiovascular disease, dementia and diabetes compared to those who walk 2,000 steps. The findings were published on Wednesday in The Lancet Public Health, a medical journal.

“Higher step counts beyond 7,000 may add extra benefits, but the rate of gain slows,” Melody Ding, a public health professor at the University of Sydney who led the review, told The Telegraph. “Still, if you’re already active and consistently hitting 10,000, there’s no need to cut back.”

Ding and her colleagues combined the results of 31 earlier studies involving over 1,60,000 adults and found that even modest step counts of 4,000 per day are associated with better health than low activity levels such as 2,000 per day.

Researchers from Australia, Norway and the UK collaborated for what they have described as the first comprehensive review of the link between daily step counts and health outcomes.

“From the point of view of achievability and sustainability, 7,000 is a good number, especially so for Indians,” said Anjana Ranjit Mohan, a physician at the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation, Chennai, who was not associated with the review.

Anjana, a coauthor of an earlier global study that had found the proportion of insufficiently physically active Indians had more than doubled from 22 per cent in 2000 to 49 per cent in 2022, said limited evidence suggests most Indians walk 2,500 to 3,500 steps a day.

Ding and others believe the target of 10,000 steps per day emerged during the marketing of a step-counting device in Japan in the 1960s. “It became popular over the years and is a convenient target for health campaigns, likely because it is a memorable round number,” Ding said.

But both the US Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans in 2018 and the World Health Organisation Guidelines for Physical Activity in 2020 had viewed available evidence as insufficient for step count targets in their guidelines. Interest in daily target step counts, however, has grown among health researchers and the public.

“The take-home message from this review is: any increase in daily steps — even 4,000 — delivers health benefits compared to very low activity levels such as 2,000 steps,” Ding said. “When possible, 7,000 steps can substantially reduce risks for many chronic diseases.”

The researchers have cautioned that the evidence for health benefits for conditions such as cancer and dementia comes from a small number of studies, meaning the confidence in the results for these is low. Some studies did not take into account factors such as age or frailty that could influence the results.