Walking Six Miles Each Week Could Reduce Chance of Getting Alzheimer's
November 30, 2010
Walking is the best medicine to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s – and cut your risk of getting it, claim researchers.
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They prescribe five miles of walking a week to reduce the chances of the disease getting worse.
Healthy people should walk six miles to reduce their chances of developing it, says a new US study.
It found regular daily walking strengthens the brain’s memory circuits and also helps people who are starting to become forgetful.
Researchers used MRI scans to investigate how regular physical activity affected the structure of the brain in people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease.
Lead researcher Dr Cyrus Raji of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine said: ‘We found that walking five miles per week protects brain structure over 10 years in people with Alzheimer’s and MCI, especially in areas of the brain’s key memory and learning centres.
‘We also found that these people had a slower decline in memory loss over five years.’
In cases of MCI, a person has cognitive or memory problems which are more marked than typical age-related memory loss, but not yet as severe as those found in Alzheimer’s disease.
About half of the people with MCI progress to Alzheimer’s disease.
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Dr Raji said ‘Because a cure for Alzheimer’s is not yet a reality, we hope to find ways of alleviating disease progression or symptoms in people who already are cognitively impaired.’
Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, which causes shrinkage of the brain, affect more than 700,000 people in the UK.
For some sufferers new drugs can delay the progress of devastating symptoms such as memory loss and erosion of the ability to do everyday things but there is currently no cure for the disease.
For the ongoing study, the researchers analysed the relationship between physical activity and brain structure in 426 people in their 70s and 80s, including 299 healthy adults, 83 patients with MCI and 44 Alzheimer’s sufferers. The researchers monitored how far each person walked in a week.
After 10 years everyone underwent 3-D MRI exams to identify changes in brain volume, which is a vital sign for the brain, said Dr Raji.
‘When it decreases, that means brain cells are dying. But when it remains higher, brain health is being maintained’ he added.
In addition, patients and the healthy volunteers were tested using the mini-mental state exam (MMSE) to track cognitive decline over five years.
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