Eleanor Hayward in the Times of London writes:

Climbing stairs daily instead of getting the lift can halve the risk of women suffering heart attacks, a study has found.

Researchers looked at 81,000 middle-aged Britons, who wore trackers to monitor their daily activity levels.

Just one to four minutes per day of intense exercise — such as walking up a couple of flights of stairs or running for a bus — was enough to dramatically cut the risk of heart problems.

Women who did no formal exercise but still recorded three minutes a day of “intense activity” were 51 per cent less likely to have a heart attack than those who were completely inactive. They also had a 67 per cent lower risk of being diagnosed with heart failure.

Short bursts of intense exercise had a greater impact on the health of women than men, which the study authors said was because women tended to have lower cardio fitness than men. Men who did no formal exercise but managed six minutes of exercise bursts a day cut their risk of heart attacks, strokes and heart failure by 16 per cent.

Writing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the authors urged adults to incorporate vigorous bursts of exercise into their daily routine.

The team, led by Professor Emmanuel Stamatakis at the University of Sydney, said that their findings showed the importance of sex-specific activity guidelines to prevent heart disease.

The study used data from 81,000 people in the UK Biobank study, who had an average age of 61. They wore an activity tracker for seven days between 2013 and 2015, and were then monitored until November 2022.

Some 22,000 of the participants reported doing no regular exercise and scientists looked at how often this group did daily “bursts” of activity.

During the follow-up period, 331 women and 488 men had a heart attack or stroke, developed heart failure or died of heart disease.

There was a “clear dose-response relationship” between the number of minutes of intense exercise and the reduced risk of heart attacks.