Exercise May Guard Girls Against Dementia in Later Years
Researchers have found link between exercise in adolescence and dementia but more study is needed to find definitive proof.
| Category | Workplace Wellness |
| Details | If you want to help your young daughter avoid dementia much later on in life, a new study suggests it might be a good idea to send her outside to play. Canadian researchers believe they've found a link between exercise in adolescence and fewer cases of senility in a woman's senior years. The study doesn't definitively prove that exercise lowers the risk of dementia. And the research is only based on the recollections of older women, some with signs of dementia, about their childhoods. Still, the findings suggest that "early life physical activity is important to late-life health and in particular in preventing late-life cognitive impairment. The sooner you start being physically active, the better it is," said study author Laura E. Middleton, a researcher at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto. Scientists have been trying to document a link between exercise and dementia in later life in the hopes of understanding how physical activity affects the brain. The new study was designed to examine how exercise in youth may affect women in their later years. The researchers don't know if exercise in childhood directly leads to less dementia since other factors could be at play, such as diet. And exercising as kids -- playing outdoors, for example -- may set a pattern for physical activity later in life, Middleton said. If there is a cause-and-effect link between early exercise and less mental decline, she said it may have something to do with the brain's ability to change and develop new circuitry. It's also possible that exercise leads to less clogging of blood vessels in the brain, she said. The researchers asked more than 9,300 women in the United States about their exercise habits before the age of 18, at 30, at 50 and in late life. All were over 65, and their average age was 72. |
| Author | Randy Dotinga |
| Publication Date | June 30, 2010 |
| Source | consumer.healthday.com |
| Format | |
| Availability | The findings appear in the June 30 issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society |
