Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Older, fitter adults experience greater brain activity while learning (Physical and brain fitness)

medicalxpress.com ^ | 1/13/17 | N/A 

Older adults who experience good cardiac fitness may be also keeping their brains in good shape as well.

In what is believed to be the first study of its kind, older adults who scored high on cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) tests
performed better on memory tasks than those who had low CRF.
Further, the more fit older adults were, the more active their brain was during learning.
These findings appear in the journal Cortex.
Difficulty remembering new information represents one of the most common complaints in aging
and decreased memory performance is one of the hallmark impairments in Alzheimer's disease.

Healthy young (18-31 years) and older adults (55-74 years) with a wide range of fitness levels walked and jogged on a treadmill
while researchers assessed their cardiorespiratory fitness by measuring the ratio of inhaled and exhaled oxygen and carbon dioxide.
These participants also underwent MRI scans which collected images of their brain while they learned and remembered names that were associated with pictures of unfamiliar faces.

The researchers found that older adults, when compared to younger adults, had more difficulty learning and remembering the correct name that was associated with each face.
Age differences in brain activation were observed during the learning of the face-name pairs, with older adults showing decreased brain activation in some regions and increased brain activation in others.
However, the degree to which older adults demonstrated these age-related changes in memory performance and brain activity largely depended on their fitness level.
In particular, high fit older adults showed better memory performance and increased brain activity patterns compared to their low fit peers.
(Excerpt) Read more at medicalxpress.com ...

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