Gait Speed Assessment

Gait speed assessment measures how fast a person walks over a short, fixed course at their usual pace, expressed in metres per second, and uses that single number as a remarkably powerful indicator of overall health in older adults. Often called the 'sixth vital sign,' usual walking speed integrates the function of many systems — muscles, joints, nerves, heart, lungs, and cognition — into one easily obtained measure. The decisive evidence came from Studenski and colleagues' 2011 JAMA study, which pooled individual data from nine cohorts comprising 34,485 community-dwelling older adults and showed that gait speed predicted survival across age and sex, with each 0.1 metre-per-second increment associated with better survival. Strikingly, predicted survival from age, sex, and gait speed was as accurate as predictions from more complex models using multiple chronic conditions and risk factors. Common interpretive thresholds — around 0.8 metres per second to flag elevated risk and roughly 1.0 metres per second or above for healthier aging — make the measure clinically actionable. Because it needs only a stopwatch and a few metres of floor, gait speed has become a cornerstone of geriatric assessment and frailty and sarcopenia criteria.