NEW YORK: Care about the future of your feet? You might want to consider your shoe choices carefully, new research shows.

Older women who said they usually wore athletic shoes or sneakers in the past were 67 per cent less likely to have pain in the back of their feet than women who used other types of footwear.

“It’s important to pay attention to the shoes that you’re buying and make sure they fit,” Ms Alyssa Dufour, a graduate student at the Institute for Aging Research Hebrew SeniorLife in Boston and one of the researchers on the study, said.

Foot pain is extremely common among older people, and can be disabling, Ms Dufour and her colleagues note in Arthritis Care & Research.

Women are more likely than men to have pain in their feet and their choice of footwear could be a factor.

Ms Dufour and her team interviewed 3,378 men and women participating in the Framingham Study, a long-term investigation of heart health. Their average age was 66.

One in every four study participants – 19 per cent of men and 29 per cent of women – said they had foot pain on most days.

The researchers asked people what type of shoe they wore most commonly during five age categories, beginning in their 20s.

They classified shoes into “good” (sneakers, athletic shoes), “average” (hard-soled leather shoes and rubber-soled shoes) and “poor” (heels or pumps, sandals and slippers).

For men there was no relationship between footwear and foot pain. But for women, wearing “good” shoes reduced the likelihood of having pain in the heel, ankle and lower Achilles tendon by two thirds.