Associations between Daily Walking and Subclinical Health Markers in a Swiss City

Every year, the Health Bus (Bus Santé) enables a representative sample of around 1000 members of the non-institutionalised adult population of Geneva, Switzerland, to undergo a health evaluation including physical measurements, blood tests and questionnaires. Results for 1102 women and 1000 men aged 20-80 who attended the Health Bus in 2013-2014 were obtained. We combined three items from the Physical Activity Frequency Questionnaire – minutes per week spent walking normally, fast/uphill, and while carrying/pulling a load – to create a metric for daily walking (combining walking for transport and for leisure). We compared this metric to results obtained by the participants for 8 subclinical endpoints, including BMI. We fitted a generalised multivariate linear model on SPSS. The significance of associations between variables was evaluated using the F-statistic (with p