The key to thinking young? More exercise
Intensive workouts may keep aging minds sharp, a study shows.
Older Americans who engage in strenuous exercise are more mentally nimble, have better memory function and process information more speedily than do their more sedentary peers, new research suggests.
And as they continued to age, participants who were very physically active at the start of a five-year study lost less ground cognitively than did couch potatoes, according to the study.
The latest research, published Wednesday in the journal Neurology, is the most recent study to underscore the importance of moderate to intensive exercise in healthy aging.
In addition to keeping diabetes, heart disease and osteoporosis at bay or in check, a welter of studies suggests a good workout is powerful medicine for the aging brain, preventing and treating depression and shoring up cognitive function.
The latest research parses out the cognitive benefits of moderate to intensive physical activity in an ethnically diverse group of Manhattanites with an average age of 71 upon entry into the study.
Latinos represented roughly 60%, and 20% of the participants identified as black. Nearly half had a high school education or less. Most were followed for about five years.
What distinguished the intensive exercisers from those with light or no leisure-time physical activity?
In the previous two weeks before enrollment, they reported engaging in activities several times a week likely to get their heart rates up. Those who reported light or no leisure-time physical activity made up the remaining 90% of participants.
“If you’re thinking strolling, you’re not going to make it” into that top 10% category, said the study’s lead author, University of Miami neurologist Clinton B. Wright. “You need to do a significant amount of exercise and get your heart rate up to fit into the moderateto-heavy category.”
When researchers looked only at subjects who had no evidence of cognitive impairment when they enrolled in the study, they found a stark difference in memory function between the highly active and those who engaged in no leisuretime physical activity or only light-intensity activity.
After five years, exercisers were the equivalent of 10 years younger than the light- and non-exercisers on measures of “episodic memory” function — the ability to recall past experiences and autobiographical information.
The new research also suggests that vascular health is a key link between physical and mental fitness as we age.
The health of our blood vessels is likely inf luenced by the exercise we do; in turn, the health of those vessels affects our mental agility as we age as well.
Researchers turned up evidence that having risk factors for stroke, most notably hypertension, effectively contributes to accelerated brain aging. That became clear in the new study when its author adjusted for variations in participants’ vascular risk factors.
When the researchers took into account these risk factors, they found that exercising was not as powerful a predictor of how well a person’s brain aged. A recent history of moderate to intensive exercise remained a predictor of episodic memory function and speed of processing, but the relationship became less pronounced.
That suggests that when the tiny blood vessels that supply oxygen throughout the brain are in good condition, cognitive impairment and its scary older sibling, dementia, are less likely to take hold. Regular exercise, which is known to keep blood vessels throughout the body in good condition, may indirectly help to minimize the cognitive decline that comes with age.