CHICAGO: A workplace exercise challenge using pedometers and social media in a global competition shows potential to improve health in a study involving almost 70,000 employees in 64 countries.

In the program, office teams compete against each other or with groups at companies in other countries to see who can take the most daily steps during a 100-day challenge. Workers post progress on a special social media website — for motivation and to egg on rival teams.

The study found workers on average increased their daily activity by 3,500 steps, exercised for almost one extra day per week, reduced sitting time by about 45 minutes daily, and lost about three pounds during the contests. Whether the changes were lasting isn’t known.

The research was presented Sunday in Chicago at the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting.

Dr. Anand Ganesan, a cardiologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia led the study. Researchers analyzed 2012-14 data on yearly contests involving the Stepathlon program, created by Stepathlon Lifestyle Pvt. Ltd., a Mumbai, India-based Wellness company.

Participation was voluntary and increased each year; more than 20,000 blue-collar and white-collar workers worldwide were involved in the 2014 challenge.

Not all completed their programs although the number of dropouts isn’t known, Ganesan said. Full data were available for almost 37,000 workers, a little over half the enrollees.

Workers in developed and developing nations participated, mostly in Asia but including Europe, North and South America, and Africa. Ganesan said that suggests similar programs could have benefits in countries with poor access to preventive health care.

“Getting people to be physically active and change their behavior is hugely challenging” worldwide, Ganesan said. He said the results show that using technology in a clever way has broad appeal and might be able to help fight the world’s No. 1 killer: Heart disease causes 18 million deaths globally each year.

Dr. Jeffrey Kuvin of Tufts Medical Center, vice chairman of the cardiology meeting, called the program novel and the results tantalizing given that short-term benefits were seen on such a large scale, although he said more follow-up is needed.

“If we can increase exercise and decrease sitting ... clearly we are going to make some headway in reducing cardiovascular risk,” he said.

Statin benefits in lower risk patients

The first major research of its kind shows that cholesterol-lowering statins can prevent heart attacks and strokes in a globally diverse group of older people who don’t have heart disease.

The results bolster recommendations in recent guidelines on who should consider taking the drugs.

The aim was to prevent heart problems using a statin alone, blood pressure drugs or a combination of the two. The three approaches are commonly used in high risk patients or those with evidence of heart disease. The patients in the study did not have heart disease and faced lower risks of developing it, and the statin approach worked best.

The research involved nearly 13,000 men and women from 21 countries on six continents. Most previous studies on heart disease prevention have been in white, North American patients with higher risks because of high blood pressure, unhealthy cholesterol levels or other conditions.

But with heart disease a leading global killer, causing 18 million deaths each year, there is a trend toward recommending preventive drug treatment to more borderline patients.

The benefits of this strategy were “seen in people from every part of the world,” said study co-author Dr. Salim Yusuf, a professor of medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. “This is globally applicable.”

The research was published online Saturday in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at an American College of Cardiology meeting in Chicago.

Study sites included Canada, Europe, China, South America and South Africa. About 20 percent of patients were white.

Patients were at moderate risk because of age — men were 55 and older and women were at least age 60 — and because they had another heart disease risk factor, including obesity, family history or smoking. On average, their cholesterol levels were nearly normal and blood pressure was slightly lower than the cutoff for high blood pressure, which is 140 over 90.

They were randomly assigned to receive one of the treatments in low doses or dummy pills for almost six years. The drug treatments all reduced cholesterol and blood pressure levels but other results varied.

Statin-only patients were about 25 percent less likely to have fatal or nonfatal heart-related problems than those given dummy pills. Those in the combined drug group fared slightly better and the researchers credit the statin for the benefit.