Activity sharpens even dementia-affected brains, report suggests

Moving more might help to keep people’s brains sharp as they age – even in the face of dementia, researchers have said.

Scientists have found older adults fared better when it came to cognitive tasks if they clocked up higher levels of daily activity on a wrist-based tracker – something the researchers said picked up everything from exercising to mundane tasks like chopping onions.

What’s more, the benefits of movement remained even when the team took into account the level of tell-tale signs of Alzheimer’s and other dementia-related diseases in the brain.

Co-author of the Rush University study, Dr Aron Buchman, said the results showed that “even though we don’t have a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease pathology, and we know people are accumulating it, you can mitigate the deleterious effects … by having more activity.”

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