Study Links Midlife Activity Levels to Future Dementia Risk

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Staying both physically and mentally active in midlife seems to protect your brain decades later, according to a new study out today in Neurology.

The study, which is being praised for its considerable duration, involved 800 Swedish women with an average age of 47 who were followed for 44 years. At the start of the study, participants

completed a detailed questionnaire about their daily activities, from hobbies to theater outings to housework and exercise. They were then given either a high or a low score in two areas:

mental and physical activity. 

The results? Women assigned to the high level of mental activity were 46 percent less likely to have developed Alzheimer’s disease and 34 percent less likely to have developed dementia

overall than the women in the low activity group. The women who were more physically active were 52 percent less likely to have developed a type of dementia associated with cerebrovascular

disease and 56 percent less likely to have developed more general dementia than the women in the group deemed less physically active.

Physician and study author Jenna Najar of the Institute for Neuroscience and Physiology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden recognized that “one important limitation” of the work “is

that the activities were only assessed at the beginning of the study, and all participants were Swedish women, which makes it difficult to generalize the results to other populations in the

world.”

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But Najar did adjust results to take into account things like high blood pressure, cigarette smoking and diabetes, which could have affected the participants’ individual risks of dementia.

She and her team also ran the results again after excluding women who developed dementia about halfway through the study to rule out the possibility that those women started the study in a

very early stage of dementia that might have already been limiting their participation in activities.