It is believed that a healthy mind lives in a fit body, and to keep the body fit experts say one should exercise every other day or 3 times a week. Concreting this belief further, two new studies have linked the fit body with less brain damage in the area which control memory.
In the first study, researchers at the University of Kansas Medical Center, in Kansas City suggest that people with early Alzheimer's have remarkably less shrinkage in their brains if they have higher levels of physical fitness.
In their study, released Sunday at the 2008 International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease in Chicago, researchers have used Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other neuroimaging tools to analyze how exercise affects the brains of patients with early Alzheimer's.
The study, which is believed to be the first to compare brain volume and fitness in Alzheimer's patients, looked at the relationship between fitness and brain volume in 56 healthy adults and 60 adults with early Alzheimer's disease.
All the study participants were over the age of sixty, whose cardiorespiratory fitness was tested on a treadmill, and they also underwent MRI scans of their brains. After analyzing the data researchers found that patients with early Alzheimer's disease who exercised daily saw less deterioration in hippocampuses, the brain structure key to memory, than those who didn’t do any physical activity.
"This is the first study to get an inside look into specifically where these changes occur in the brain — we're able to locate the changes associated with fitness to the actual memory region, the hippocampus, which is a key area for Alzheimer's-related atrophy," said Robyn A. Honea, PhD, a lead researcher of the study. "This suggests that maintaining cardiorespiratory fitness may positively modify Alzheimer's-related brain atrophy."
In another study, researchers from Western Medicine, a consultant physician service provider for Hollywood Hospital in Nedlands, Western Australia, found that people with dementia who took part in a 12-month home exercise program directed by their caregivers fell significantly less often and better quality of life than those who got ordinary care.
Funded by the Sir Charles Gairdner Research Foundation and Hollywood Private Hospital Research Foundation, the Australian study states that patients suffering from dementia fall up to three times more than those who have no cognitive impairment.
"Falls have a negative impact on a person's quality of life, often resulting in nursing home placement, increased mortality and significant costs to the community," said Megan J. Wraith, a speech pathologist at Western Medicine and a researcher on the study. "Targeting this high risk group may be a relatively cost effective way of having a significant impact on the overall rate of falling in the elderly."
Alzheimer’s is mainly a neurological disorder where a person slowly and progressively starts loosing his memory due to gradual loss of brain cells. It is the most common form of dementia (loss of intellectual ability) and is the fourth leading cause of deaths in adults according to National Institute of Health (NIH).
Alzheimer's affects almost half of all patients with dementia. The most striking early symptom of Alzheimer’s is loss of short term memory. As the disorder progresses, cognitive injury extends to the domains of language (aphasia), skilled movements (apraxia), recognition (agnosia), and those functions (such as decision-making and planning) closely related to the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain.
The disease is characterized by the development of unusual clumps of proteins called amyloid plaques and nerve cell tangles that hinder messages being processed by the brain.
AD is the third most costly disease in the U.S., after heart disease and cancer. According to the Alzheimer's Association, nearly 4.5 million people in the United States currently suffer from the illness. And, according to the latest statistics, there are about 24 million people with dementia worldwide. It has been projected that by 2040, the number of people suffering from AD will increase to 81 million.