Daily Exercise A Good Way Of Slowing Alzheimer’s: New Study

With research on in full swing to find a possible cure or at least a means of slowing down the dreaded Alzheimer’s disease, researchers have now found new evidence to suggest that exercising could be a good way of retarding the progress of the disease.

Researchers have been desperately looking for ways to at least slow down the progress of Alzheimer’s in people, if not find a cure altogether. That seems to be a top priority for them, especially in the light of forecasts about the number of people with Alzheimer’s jumping to close to 16 million by 2050, a four-fold jump from the present numbers.

New research now seems to indicate that Alzheimer’s patients who exercise regularly suffered lesser damage to the brain than those who did not. This is a finding that has piqued the interest of researchers, with some claiming this could possibly be one step towards finding a way to slow down the progress of the disease in patients.

Patients with Alzheimer’s usually lose out on brain function as nerve cells die with the progress of the disease, leading to shrinkage in the size of the brain itself. The new research showed that the brain of an Alzheimer’s patient who exercised regularly shrank lesser than that of a patient that did not exercise.

There has been earlier research showing the positive impact of exercising on memory and thought processes by enhancing blood flow and increasing the secretion of growth hormones. The findings of the new study indicate that exercising impacted the brain of Alzheimer’s patients as well, albeit positively.

Speaking during the course of a telephone interview last Friday, lead author of the study Jeffrey Burns, who is also the director of the Alzheimer’s and Memory Program at Kansas City’s University of Kansas of Medicine, said, “Until now, there was no data to suggest people with Alzheimer's may benefit from regular exercise.”

During the study, Burns and his associates put 57 patients with Alzheimer’s in the early stages and another 64 who did not have dementia through routine fitness tests and also MRI scans of the brain and then analyzed the results of the tests. All the patients in the study were at least 60 years old.

The team put the patients through cardiorespiratory fitness tests and used MRI scans of the brain to determine the shrinkage of the patients’ brains. Speaking about the tests, Burns said, “At their peak, how much oxygen they’re consuming is a measure of ho physically fit they are.”

While analyzing the test results, the team was able to determine that those patients with early stage Alzheimer’s showed lower VO2 peaks than those without dementia. The brain shrinkage was four times higher in those Alzheimer’s patients with lesser fitness levels than in those who were physically fit.

Speaking about the findings, Burns said, “People with early Alzheimer’s disease may be able to preserve their brain function for a longer period of time by exercising regularly and potentially reducing the amount of brain volume lost. Evidence shows decreasing brain volume is tied to poorer cognitive performance, so preserving more brain volume may translate into better cognitive performance.”

Speaking about the findings of the new study, Alzheimer’s Association medical and scientific advisory council chairman Dr. Sam Gandy said the results were in line with earlier findings that indicated people could maintain a healthy brain as well as a healthy heart b following one single regimen.