Exercise In Older Adults Helps Improve Brain Health

New findings published in the journal PLOS ONE reveal that fitness can help improve cognitive flexibility in older adults.

"We want to know how the brain relates to the body, and how physical health influences mental and brain health in aging," Agnieszka Burzynska, who led the study, said in a statement. "Here, instead of a structural measure, we are taking a functional measure of brain health. And we are finding that tracking changes in blood-oxygenation levels over time is useful for predicting cognitive functioning and physical health in aging."

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign discovered that older adults who are physically active had greater mental flexibility, which may help doctors determine how physically active they are by simply imaging brain patterns.

In this recent study, they examined 100 adults between the ages of 60 and 80. They also used accelerometers to measure physical activity levels over a week.

Findings revealed that spontaneous brain activity showed more moment-to-moment fluctuations in the more-active adults.

"In a previous study, we showed that in some of the same regions of the brain, those people who have higher brain variability also performed better on complex cognitive tasks, especially on intelligence tasks and memory,"

The researchers noted how the study further highlights another way to assess brain health in the aging mind. 

"Our study, when viewed in the context of previous studies that have examined behavioral variability in cognitive tasks, suggests that more-fit older adults are more flexible, both cognitively and in terms of brain function, than their less-fit peers," researcher Art Kramer, added. 

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