Digital Data Reveal Altered Walking Patterns in COPD

TOPLINE:

Real-world gait metrics differed significantly between people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and healthy older adults and worsened progressively with disease severity. People with COPD walked more slowly and had a lower cadence— the number of steps taken per minute — than their healthy peers.

METHODOLOGY:

• Walking impairment is common in patients with COPD and linked to adverse outcomes such as mortality and exacerbation. Although reduced walking activity in these patients is well documented, data on gait — the manner of walking — are lacking, particularly in real-world settings.
• Researchers evaluated gait parameters in 549 patients with COPD (mean age, 68 years; 37% women) across seven European sites and compared them with those in 19 healthy older peers.
• Real-world walking was measured using wearable devices worn on the lower back for 1 week to identify walking bouts.
• Digital mobility outcomes were calculated from walking bouts, using aggregated parameters including gait pace, rhythm, and bout-to-bout variability, and compared across patients with increasing disease severity and healthy older peers.

TAKEAWAY:

• All gait digital mobility outcomes were normally distributed among patients with COPD and declined with increasing disease severity.
• Patients with COPD walked significantly slower during longer walking bouts (0.83 m/sec vs 0.90 m/sec; P = .041), had a lower maximum walking speed during bouts longer than 10 seconds (0.90 m/sec vs 0.98 m/sec; P = .018), and during longer bouts (0.99 m/sec vs 1.12 m/sec; P = .015) than healthy older adults.
• Stride length and duration variability did not significantly differ across severity groups or from those of healthy older adults, whereas walking speed and cadence were lower in people with COPD compared with healthy peers.

IN PRACTICE:

“For healthcare professionals, attention to gait may help assess the disease’s impact on daily life and, eventually, the effectiveness of pharmacological and nonpharmacological therapies. Importantly, by addressing changes in gait and acting on them, clinicians might be able to tackle key determinants of falls, disability, and mortality in this population,” the authors of the study wrote.

SOURCE:

This study was led by Laura Delgado-Ortiz, ISGlobal, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red Epidemiología y Salud Pública, all in Barcelona, Spain. It was published online on July 24, 2025, in the European Respiratory Journal.

LIMITATIONS:

Environmental factors such as neighborhood walkability, rurality, and weather, which may have affected real-world gait in patients with COPD, were not controlled for. A convenience sample with unequal group sizes was used, and healthy older adults were recruited during the COVID pandemic, potentially affecting gait behavior and limiting group comparisons.

DISCLOSURES:

Some authors reported receiving funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 (IMI2) and the European Commission’s IMI2 programme, support from a National Institute for Health and Care Research Biomedical Research Centre, grants from the UK Research and Innovation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and other organizations, consulting fees from Hoffmann-La Roche, Ltd., and other ties with various sources.

This article was created using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.