Growing evidence that brain health requires personalized, multi-pronged interventions

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The Right Dose of Exer­cise for the Aging Brain (New York Times):

“A small amount of exer­cise may improve our abil­i­ty to think as we age, but more may not be bet­ter, accord­ing to a new study of exer­cise and cognition…

In gen­er­al, the researchers found, most of the exer­cis­ers showed improve­ment in their think­ing skills…but these gains were about the same whether peo­ple had exer­cised for 75 min­utes a week or 225 min­utes.”

To learn more:

  • Solv­ing the Brain Fit­ness Puz­zle Is the Key to Self-Empow­ered Aging
  • Study: Dose-Response of Aer­o­bic Exer­cise on Cog­ni­tion: A Com­mu­ni­ty-Based, Pilot Ran­dom­ized Con­trolled Tri­al (PLOS ONE). From the dis­cus­sion: “There are three pri­ma­ry results from this pilot study. 1) Analy­ses restrict­ed to indi­vid­u­als adher­ing to and com­plet­ing the study sug­gest that visu­ospa­tial and atten­tion ben­e­fits may be attained at low dos­es of exer­cise with visu­ospa­tial ben­e­fits appear­ing to increase with increas­ing exer­cise dose. 2) There is a clear dose-response effect of AEx (note: aer­o­bic exer­cise) on car­diores­pi­ra­to­ry fit­ness for old­er adults val­i­dat­ing our com­mu­ni­ty-based pro­to­col for the deliv­ery of a rig­or­ous­ly con­trolled exer­cise dose. 3) In medi­a­tion analy­ses, the appar­ent cog­ni­tive ben­e­fits of AEx are best explained by gains in car­diores­pi­ra­to­ry fit­ness, sug­gest­ing that pre­scrib­ing indi­vid­u­al­ized exer­cise to max­i­mize car­diores­pi­ra­to­ry fit­ness may be impor­tant for real­iz­ing exer­cise-relat­ed cog­ni­tive benefits.”