The Best Medicine to Prevent Alzheimer's? Exercise

Instead of another medication, some researchers believe that exercise might be the key to preventing or slowing the progression of Alzheimer's disease.

According to researchers at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, they found that not only can exercise improve your cognitive functioning abilities, but it can actually decrease your risk for getting Alzheimer's.

"We found that after 12 weeks of being on a moderate exercise program, study participants improved their neural efficiency - basically they were using fewer neural resources to perform the same memory task," said Lead study author Dr. J Carson Smith, assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology, via a press release. "No study has shown that a drug can do what we showed is possible with exercise."  

Smith and colleagues examined two groups of physically inactive older adults ranging in age from 60 to 88 years old that were put on a 12-week exercise program. The programs focused on regular treadmill walking and was guided by a personal trainer. One of the groups had mild cognitive impairment and the other group had healthy brain function, yet were able to improve their cardiovascular fitness by up to ten percent at the end of the intervention. Amazingly, both groups also improved cognitive abilities involving brain function and memory retrieval tasks.

According to Smith, the best news regarding the study is that these exercise requirements were what's recommended for the their age level and not out of reach for any study participants, totaling to 150 minutes of moderate to strenuous exercise per week.

More information regarding the study can be found in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.