Can daily physical activity improve cognitive health in midlife?

The research team found that middle-aged people who participated in daily exercise felt four years younger, regardless of whether the activity was low-intensity, such as walking the dog or doing housework, or high-intensity, such as jogging. They found that they showed comparable increases in cognitive processing speed. .

The research results were published in a magazine Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

“You don't have to go to the gym to experience all the potential benefits of physical activity,” says Jonathan Hakun, assistant professor of neurology and psychology at Penn State University and Penn State College of Medicine. “Every movement counts. Daily movement counts as a source of accumulated physical activity, which can contribute to a healthy lifestyle and can directly impact cognitive health. ”

Previous studies that have investigated the relationship between physical activity and cognitive health have typically investigated long-term relationships. For example, retrospective studies spanned decades, and intervention studies spanned months to a year. Hakun said he is interested in connecting the dots more quickly to understand the potential short-term effects of physical activity on cognitive health.

The research team leveraged smartphone technology and interacted with participants multiple times during normal daily life using a protocol called ecological momentary assessment. Over the course of nine days, participants checked in six times a day, approximately every 3.5 hours.

During each check-in, participants reported whether they had been physically active since their last check-in. If they were active, they were asked to rate the intensity of their activity as mild, moderate, or vigorous. For example, walking and cleaning were considered light intensity, while running, high-speed biking, and vigorous hiking were considered vigorous intensity. Participants were then prompted to play two “brain games.” One is designed to assess cognitive processing speed and the other is designed to assess working memory, which Hakun says could be a proxy for executive function.

The research team analyzed data from 204 participants recruited for a multicultural healthy eating study to reduce the risk of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease. Data were collected during the baseline period of the study. Participants were between the ages of 40 and 65 and resided in the Bronx, New York, with no history of cognitive impairment. Half of the participants were black or African American, and 34% were Hispanic.

The researchers found that when participants reported being physically active in the past 3.5 hours, they experienced an increase in processing speed equivalent to being four years younger. Although no improvements in working memory were observed, response times during working memory tasks mirrored the improvements observed in processing speed.

“As we age, we slow down both physically and cognitively. The idea here is that we can temporarily counteract that through movement. That's compelling.” Hakun he said. “A little walk or a little extra movement can be energizing.”

Additionally, people who reported being more active often experienced greater short-term benefits compared to those who reported less physical activity overall. Hakun said this suggests that regular physical activity may increase cognitive health benefits. However, he explained that more research is needed to understand how much physical activity and the frequency and timing of activity influence cognitive health.

Future research will include combining ecological momentary assessments with activity monitoring tools to better track associations between observed physical activity, behavior, and cognitive outcomes, Hakun said. states that it is possible. We also hope to collect longitudinal data to see how daily physical activity affects long-term cognitive health compared to normal aging.

Other Penn State authors on the paper include data scientist Daniel Elvik; Tian Qiu, PhD student in epidemiology and public health. Martin Sliwinski, professor of human development and family studies; Other authors include Lisbeth Benson, research assistant professor at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research; Mindy Katz, Senior Associate Professor, Department of Neurology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Pamela Shaw, Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute Senior Biostatistics Researcher; Yasmin Mosavar Rahmani, professor of epidemiology and population health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine;

This research was supported by funding from the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health.