How Much Do You Think Daily Step Count Reduces Your Healthcare Costs?

It’s said that if you think staying healthy is an expensive endeavor, then you haven’t considered the costs of poor health—because invariably that is more expensive.

But how much a difference does such a simple, basic-level thing like daily step count make?

Counting the steps, and the savings

A researcher (yes, one, it’s rare for this to be in the singular, but there is one researcher’s name on this paper, and her name is Dr. Haruka Kato) analyzed objective daily step counts and health insurance claims from 20,950 long-term users of Osaka Prefecture’s A-Smile health app, aged 40 and older, covering 338,706 person-months (i.e., if instead of the participants experiencing the time simultaneously, their experiences were all laid out back-to-back in a big long line, such that we can measure the total) between 2020 and 2023.

The results were interesting insofar as they weren’t the same for all age brackets studied:

• Middle-aged adults: among adults aged 40–64, healthcare costs showed little relationship with daily step counts, suggesting that other factors played a larger role in determining expenditure.
• Older adults: among adults aged 65 and older, predicted healthcare costs were substantially higher at lower step counts and declined steeply as daily steps increased. the relationship between walking and lower healthcare costs was much stronger in this age group.

That said, and consistent with related results we’ve seen in other studies relating to step counts, predicted healthcare costs stopped declining and levelled off at approximately 11,000 steps per day, with the plateau occurring at 11,317 steps for adults aged 40–64 and 10,612 steps for those aged 65 and older.

Even if you don’t get that many, though, you may want to bear in mind: How Many Steps Per Day To Beat Alzheimer’s? (A Lot Fewer Than You Might Think)

And, for that reason, Instead Of Chasing 10,000 Steps…

It’s also worth noting that although the strength of the relationship between walking and healthcare costs changed considerably with age, the daily step count at which costs levelled off remained relatively similar across both age groups.

You read her paper in full, here: Non-linear association between mHealth-measured daily steps and subsequent healthcare expenditures among long-term app users in Osaka, Japan

On which note, with regard to this specifically being a study in Japan, this may also have been relevant: The Japanese Health Initiative That Lowers Blood Sugars

Want to learn more?

To best optimize what you’re doing with your walking, consider:

Should You Prioritize Walking Farther Or Walking More Often?

Take care!