A BRISK walk a few times a week may be enough to reverse signs of brain ageing and improve memory in older adults.
A moderate walk three times a week reversed the natural signs of ageing in people between 55 and 80 years and led to higher scores in memory tests, according to research from the United States.
An expert in ageing here described the work as “really interesting” given the researchers were able to show a direct link between exercise and brain health. “To my knowledge it is the first time there has been hard evidence that exercise can have this effect,” said Prof Rose Anne Kenny, professor of clinical gerontology at Trinity College Dublin.
There was already good observational data that this was true, Prof Kenny said yesterday. “It is consistent with people’s observations. It is really interesting because it represents hard anatomical evidence.”
Prof Kenny is also the lead principal investigator of the Tilda project, The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing. Tilda will study subjects as they age and involves a number of third-level institutions and bodies such as the Economic and Social Research Institute.
The US study focused on a small part of the brain called the hippocampus. It is central to all forms of memory formation and tends to shrink naturally as we age.
The researchers recruited 120 older people without dementia and divided them into two groups, those who exercised, in this case walking, and those who only did stretching exercises. The findings are published this morning in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Those on the exercise regimen walked around a track for 40 minutes a day, three days a week. All subjects had their hippocampus scanned at the start, after six months and after 12 months.
Those taking the aerobic exercise recorded about a 2 per cent increase in hippocampus size, while those doing the stretching exercises showed a 1.4 per cent shrinkage of hippocampus.
All subjects were given memory tests at the three intervals. Those in the aerobic exercise group showed improved memory function by the end of the study, something the scientists linked to the increased hippocampus size.
They also tested for several “biomarkers”, chemicals in the blood associated with brain health. and found that increased hippocampal size was linked to increased amounts of a biomarker associated with learning and memory.
The results showed that moderate exercise was enough to “lead to substantial improvements in memory and brain health”, said senior author Dr Art Kramer of the University of Illinois.
