“It’s very important to know that if you have a family history of dementia, you can use physical activity to reduce your risk,” Dr. Perhaps most encouragingly, the association between physical activity and a reduced risk of dementia extended to participants who had a family history of dementia. “You get a lot more bang for your buck in terms of helping to promote your own health through physical activity.” Cultivating this habit of exercise “is likely to have a very profound synergistic effect,” he said.
Salinas, who recommends that people aim for 150 minutes of moderate- to high-intensity exercise a week, the results strengthen the idea that regular moderate to vigorous exercise can promote brain health. “It might be that if you do three hours of household chores, you are as good as if you did 30 minutes of aerobic exercise.”įor Dr. Sandra Weintraub, a neurologist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, who was not associated with this study. “Some people work up quite a sweat when they are doing household chores,” said Dr.
“Some use the total amount, and some just focus on one mode of activity.” The British questionnaires offered specificity on exactly which activities participants were engaging in on a regular basis. One of the major constraints of previous studies was that “the definition of physical activity is quite weak,” Dr. They were also asked about various lifestyle factors, including how often they completed household chores. This included a risk profile of participants based on whether they had genetic variants known to be associated with dementia, or whether they had immediate family members with the condition.Īt the beginning of the study, participants filled out detailed questionnaires about their participation in physical activities, such as playing sports, climbing stairs or walking, and whether they regularly walked or biked to work. Huan Song, a researcher at West China Hospital, Sichuan University, who was one of the study’s authors. One of the main advantages of this database was that it had “very enriched data about the genetics” of the participants, said Dr.
In the first study, published July 27 in the journal Neurology, researchers analyzed the health information of 501,376 participants who did not have dementia in a British database called UK Biobank to establish links between physical activity and the risk of developing the disease. Many forms of exercise can stave off dementia.
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