Exercise Slows Brain Aging By Ten Years

Yes, ten years. That’s the difference in brain aging in people who do light or no exercise and people who do moderate to intense exercise. Science Daily reports on a study, conducted by researchers from the University of Miami, Florida, that asked 876 people how long and how often they exercised during the two weeks prior to that date. An average of seven years later, each person was given tests of memory and thinking skills and a brain MRI, and five years after that they took the memory and thinking tests again. First, some numbers. About 90 percent of the participants reported light exercise (walking or yoga) or no exercise. The remaining 10 percent reported moderate to high intensity exercise (running, aerobics, or calisthenics). When the researchers looked at people who had no signs of memory and thinking problems at the start of the study, they found that those reporting low activity levels showed a greater decline over five years compared to those with high activity levels on tests of how fast they could perform simple tasks and how many words they could remember from a list.  Yes, the difference was equal to 10 years of aging.