Frailty Affects Risk of Alzheimer’s and Physical Activity Improves Cognition

August 12, 2008

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Both the amount of physical activity and the level of frailty affect the risk of developing Alzheimer’s. Increased physical activity improves cognition, and increased frailty increases the risk of Alzheimer’s. This provides another reason for keeping active as you age.

A study shows that those elderly with a high level of frailty were at increased risk for getting Alzheimer’s. The findings demonstrated that those with Alzheimer’s disease were twice as likely to be frail as those who did not have the pathology of this disease.

Due to the association of frailty and Alzheimer’s, the researchers suggest that when a person becomes frail, it might be a good time to test them for Alzheimer’s and perhaps diagnose it early, if it is developing.

The findings do not indicate whether being frail increases the risk of Alzheimer’s or whether becoming frail is associated with the development of the disease.

In another study, the level of physical activity was linked to cognition. Those who had higher physical activity levels were found to have higher cognition levels. Interestingly, this held true when the researchers measured activity, but not for self reported activity. Different people have different ideas of how much physical activity that they do.

Again it may be a chicken and egg situation. Does less activity lead to lower cognition, or are those who have lower cognition levels liable to do less exercise. I think I am not going to wait for them to find out, but will try to keep my moderate exercise (mainly walking) program. Better safe than sorry. I just want to poop out one day, and not have a long increasingly restricted decline. Time will tell.

photo credit: daniel arnold!