Staying mentally sharp—that's aging Americans' highest priority, according to the National Council on Aging. While thousands of clinical trials suggest that exercising the body can protect or improve brain health as we age, few studies provide practical prescriptive guidance for how much and what kind of exercise.
Now, an exhaustive systematic review of 4,600 clinical trials—led by researchers at the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and published online today in Neurology: Clinical Practice - provides new insight into the optimal dose of exercise- what kind and how much—for maintaining cognitive performance in healthy older adults, as well as those with mild cognitive impairment and dementia.
"While there is solid evidence to suggest that maintaining a regular exercise regimen can improve brain health we were most interested in how we could practically apply these scientific findings to the lives of our patients, their family members and even to ourselves," said corresponding author Joyce Gomes-Osman, PT, Ph.D., a post-doctoral research scholar at the Berenson-Allen Center who is also an assistant professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. "For other forms of treatments such as prescription drugs, patients are prescribed a specific amount. Our study highlights the need to get this specific with exercise, too."
[For more on this study by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, go to https://medicalxpress.com/news...on-older-adults.html]
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