“The current findings suggest that maintaining high fitness in midlife may boost brain health on average 20 years later in adults who have not yet experienced cognitive impairment,” lead study author Qu Tian, a gerontology researcher at the U.S. National Institute on Aging, said by email.
Tian and colleagues followed 146 older adults over a decade, using treadmill tests to measure cardiorespiratory fitness. They also used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to detect changes in brain volume.
At the start of the study in 1994, participants were 69 years old on average. To be included, they had to be healthy and free of cognitive impairment, dementia, Parkinson’s disease or other neurological problems and have no history of stroke, heart or lung disease, or cancer.
In the treadmill tests at the start of the study, researchers used mathematical models to estimate participants’ fitness levels when they were age 50.
People who were fitter at 50 had greater brain volume later in life in the middle temporal gyrus, believed to be involved in memory, language and visual perception, as well as in the perirhinal cortex, thought to aid unconscious memory and object recognition. They also had a greater volume of white matter; when this declines, it may be an early symptom of Alzheimer’s disease.
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