Slow walking may not only mean getting to your destination later, according to a new study by French scientists: Older people who walk slowly are almost three times more likely to die of heart disease and related causes than older people who walk faster.

“The main message for the general population is that maintaining fitness at older age may have important consequences and help preserve life and (muscle) function,” one of the study’s authors, Dr Alexis Elbaz, director of research at the Paris-based medical research institute Inserm.

He said the study, which appeared in the journal BMJ, also suggests that a test of walking speed might be used to test the health of elderly patients.

The five-year study, part of Inserm’s ongoing Three City Study, involved more than 3,200 relatively fit men and women, 65 to 85 years of age, living in three French cities. At the start of the study in 1999, the scientists used questionnaires and face-to-face interviews to assess the health of each participant. They then clocked the participants’ speeds as they walked down a corridor as fast as possible without running.

Over the next five years, 209 of the participants died — 99 from cancer, 59 from heart disease, and 53 from infectious diseases and other causes — for an overall death rate of almost 7 per cent. The death rate among the slowest-walking one-third of participants — those men who walked at the equivalent of about 3.4 miles per hour or slower and women who walked about 3 miles per hour or slower — was 44 per cent higher than that among the two-thirds of participants who had walked faster.

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