Clinical utility of simple subjective gait speed for the risk stratification of heart failure in a primary prevention setting

Little is known regarding the relationship between self-reported gait speed and the subsequent risk of heart failure (HF) and cardiovascular disease (CVD). We sought to clarify the clinical utility of self-reported gait speed in primary CVD prevention settings. This is an observational cohort study using the JMDC Claims Database, which is an administrative health claims database. Data were collected between January 2005 and April 2020. Medical records of 2,655,359 participants without a prior history of CVD were extracted from the JMDC Claims Database. Gait speed was assessed using information from questionnaires provided at health check-ups, and study participants were categorized into fast or slow gait speed groups. The primary outcome was HF. The secondary outcomes included myocardial infarction (MI), angina pectoris (AP), and stroke. The median age was 45.0 years, and 55.3% of participants were men. 46.1% reported a fast gait speed. The mean follow-up period was 1180 ± 906 days. HF, MI, AP, and stroke occurred in 1.9%, 0.2%, 1.9%, and 1.0% of participants, respectively. Multivariable Cox regression analyses showed that, compared with slow gait speed, fast gait speed was associated with a lower incidence of HF, MI, AP, and stroke. The discriminative predictive ability for HF significantly improved by adding self-reported gait speeds to traditional risk factors (net reclassification improvement 0.0347, p < 0.001). In conclusion, our analysis demonstrated that subjective gait speed could be a simple method to stratify the risk of HF and other CVD events in the general population. Further investigations are required to clarify the underlying mechanism of our results and to develop a novel approach for primary CVD prevention.