A new study in the journal Neurology finds that aerobic exercise can improve older adults' cognitive function, even if they've previously led inactive lives.
This type of exercise increases blood flow to the brain and counters the effects of normal aging, according to the study.
"Sure, aerobic exercise gets blood moving through your body. As our study found, it may also get blood moving to your brain, particularly in areas responsible for verbal fluency and executive functions. Our finding may be important, especially for older adults at risk for Alzheimer's and other dementias and brain disease," said study author Marc Poulin, of the University of Calgary School of Medicine in Canada.
The study involved 206 adults, average age 66, with no history of memory or heart problems. For six months, they completed supervised exercise programs three times per week. They started at 20-minute sessions and increased them to 40 minutes. They also worked out once a week on their own.
"Researchers found that after six months of exercise, participants improved by 5.7% on tests of executive function, which includes mental flexibility and self-correction. Verbal fluency, which tests how quickly you can retrieve information, increased by 2.4%.
"This change in verbal fluency is what you'd expect to see in someone five years younger," Poulin said.
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"On average, blood flow to their brain increased 2.8%—a gain tied to a number of improvements in types of thinking that typically decline with age.
"Our study showed that six months' worth of vigorous exercise may pump blood to regions of the brain that specifically improve your verbal skills as well as memory and mental sharpness," Poulin said.
"At a time when these results would be expected to be decreasing due to normal aging, to have these types of increases is exciting," he said.
