Does your brain health need a boost?
Just going for a walk is enough to help improve cognitive performance and reduce the risk of dementia, according to experts.
Getting in a few thousand steps a day has been shown to slow cognitive decline in older adults who are at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia.
While cognitive decline was delayed by three years for people who walked between 3,000 and 5,000 steps a day, that delay jumped to seven years for people who walked between 5,000 and 7,000 steps each day, Mass General Brigham researchers said.
“Lifestyle factors appear to impact the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting that lifestyle changes may slow the emergence of cognitive symptoms if we act early,” Dr. Jasmeer Chhatwal, of the facility’s neurology department, explained in a statement.
A 2022 study from the University of Rochester Medical Center showed walking while completing a cognitive test improved their performance.
“To the naked eye, there were no differences in our participants. It wasn’t until we started analyzing their behavior and brain activity that we found the surprising difference in the group’s neural signature and what makes them handle complex dual-tasking processes differently,” Eleni Patelaki, a biomedical engineering Ph.D. student, said in a release.
Other researchers have found that walking contributes to changes in the brain, producing a protein that helps to grow new nerve cells and strengthening connections between different regions of the brain.
“The brain activity was stronger and more synchronized, demonstrating exercise actually can induce the brain’s ability to change and adapt,” J. Carson Smith, a kinesiology professor with the University of Maryland School of Public Health, said in a statement.
And, more recent findings from Michigan State University show just five minutes of brisk walking is enough to improve cognition – partly because walking helps raise your heart rate which increases the flow of blood to the brain.
“What’s good for the body is usually good for the brain,” Dr. Amit Sachdev, the medical director in the school’s neurology department said.
Although, it may take a while for those benefits to kick in.
Several studies have shown that the benefits largely occur after around six months of moderate intensity walking, according to Harvard Medical School.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that U.S. adults get at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity a week for the greatest positive impacts to their health.
And, it may not even matter which direction you’re heading.
“Several studies have found that when someone walks backward, activity in the prefrontal cortex increases. That is the region of the brain associated with problem-solving, logic and making decisions,” doctors at UCLA Health said.
“In one particularly intriguing study, participants who simply visualized the act of walking backward, but were actually sitting still, improved their scores on a memory test.”