Deans' stroke musings: Light Physical Activity Might Be Enough to Stave Off Dementia, New Research Says

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Monday, December 27, 2021

Light Physical Activity Might Be Enough to Stave Off Dementia, New Research Says

Well shit, I'm not taking any chances, I'm going for highly active just like I'm doing 10-12 cups of coffee a day to prevent dementia. I'm not going to fall short. Hopefully the double whammy will prevent dementia.

Coffee May Lower Your Risk of Dementia Feb. 2013

And this: Coffee's Phenylindanes Fight Alzheimer's Plaque December 2018

If your hospital hasn't created a 24 hour coffee station, they are completely and totally fucking incompetent, for at least 8 years.

Light Physical Activity Might Be Enough to Stave Off Dementia, New Research Says

Did you know the most popular new year's resolution year after year is to exercise more? While that's a valiant goal, more is not always better—especially if you set such a lofty goal that you can't stick with it…and subsequently feel like a failure and quit trying.

But you might not need to focus on going from 0 to 100 to benefit your body and your brain. Lightly active adults reduced their risk for dementia by a sizable 20% after a 3 ½ year follow-up compared to their inactive peers, according to a study published December 16 in the journal JAMA Open Network.

This echoes the findings of a study released earlier this year that found walking just 3 times per week could reduce dementia risk and builds on 2019 research that suggested 10 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per day could protect against cognitive decline. So, what exactly does light physical activity look like? According to this study, it's as light as walking at a slow or leisurely pace.

There's no cure (yet) for dementia and it's most common type, Alzheimer's disease. So doctors are hustling to determine which lifestyle habits may reduce the risk or at least delay the onset of dementia.

For this study, a team of Korean researchers tapped into medical records in the Korean National Health Insurance Service database for 62,286 participants who were 65 years or older who had not yet received a dementia diagnosis. The individuals were about 60% women and 40% men with an average age of 73. Each person recorded his or her physical activity including frequency, intensity and duration of exercise via a self-reported questionnaire. After 3 ½ years, on average, the researchers followed up and found that 6% of the participants had developed dementia.

Using these reports, the researchers split the group into levels: inactive, insufficiently active, active and highly active. In terms of dementia risk, after accounting for age, sex and other comorbidities, they found:

Inactive participants were the baseline
Insufficiently-active participants were at 10% lower risk for dementia
Active participants were at 20% lower risk for dementia
Highly-active participants were at 28% lower risk for dementia

That means even a little bit can go a long way in terms of exercise's bang for your brain buck. (BTW, those activity levels are based on one recommendation for ideal physical activity level: 500 to 999 metabolic equivalent task minutes (or MET minutes) per week. For more on what MET minutes are, check out our piece about whether it's better to sleep in or exercise when you're tired.)

Moving from sedentary to just some "light-intensity physical activity is associated with metabolism, and this vascular, cellular, and metabolic change by light-intensity physical activity could be beneficial in reducing dementia risk," Boyoung Joung, M.D., a professor of internal medicine at Yonsei University College of Medicine in Seoul, Republic of Korea, and the study's corresponding author tells Medical News Today.

That said, this study cannot prove any causal link. In other words, are those likely to develop dementia naturally less active because they're already experiencing some mild symptoms? Or could other factors be at play and the exercise rates just be a coincidence—or mis-reported since these were questionnaires that could be fibbed on?

"The idea that physical activity reduces the risk of dementia is entirely plausible, and these findings add to a growing body of evidence supporting this idea," John Gallacher, Ph.D., director of Dementias Platform UK at the University of Oxford tells Medical News Today. "The problem is reverse causation—that is, that people with dementia exercise less. This study goes some way to addressing this by looking at incident events and dropping subjects with incident dementia in the first 2 years of follow-up."