University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Jim Barlow Phone: (217) 333-5802 [email protected]
Embargoed until 2 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, July 28, 1999
EXERCISE: Walking markedly improves mental abilities of those over 60
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Aging couch potatoes, start walking. A new study has found that previously sedentary people over age 60 who walked rapidly for 45 minutes three days a week can significantly improve mental-processing abilities that otherwise decline with age.
The findings centered not on the benefits of physical conditioning but on the frontal regions of the brain, where the additional oxygen taken in during walking triggered faster reaction times and heightened the ability to ignore distractions when completing a variety of mental tasks on a computer.
"The nice result of our study is that a person who has not been physically active during his or her younger years still can benefit by walking," said Arthur F. Kramer, a University of Illinois psychologist and researcher at the U. of I. Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
The study -- funded by the National Institute on Aging -- examined the cognitive impact of walking (an aerobic workout) or doing toning exercises (anaerobic activity) on 124 adults ranging in age from 60 to 75. Some of the findings appear in the July 29 issue of the journal Nature.
Participants in both exercise groups showed improvement doing a repetitive task (pushing a button) when given a visual cue. However, the walkers were better able to process and ignore irrelevant cues and successfully complete tasks than were those who had done only toning exercises.
Processing relevant information and discarding distractions are essential to executive control, a term that covers such things as planning, inhibition and temporarily maintaining information in memory. When people drive a car, Kramer said, they must switch rapidly among complex skills -- watching other vehicles, looking for pedestrians, reading signs and ignoring unnecessary information.
"Executive control processes are largely controlled by the frontal and prefrontal regions of the brain, areas which show negative metabolic and morphological changes during the normal aging process," Kramer said. "Cells shrink and blood flow decreases. The benefits you get from walking are in the varieties of cognition that show the largest age-related decline."
Study participants walked 15 minutes a day, three days a week, at 17.7 minutes per mile, with a nurse supervising, to start. They gradually did 16-minute miles over 45-60 minutes three times a week. The toners and stretchers met three times a week for an hour during the six months of the project.
Walkers improved their oxygen intake by 5 percent, a modest but significant result, Kramer said. "Whether you'd get improvements across the board with higher levels of fitness or a lifetime of staying in shape, who knows? It is a possibility," he said. "These people were de-conditioned. They had been doing very little in terms of physical fitness."
Kramer's colleagues on the study were Sowon Hahn, Edward McAuley, Neal J. Cohen, Marie T. Banich, Cate Harrison, Julie Chason, Richard A. Boileau, Lynn Bardell and Angela Colcombe, all of the U. of I. Beckman Institute, and psychologist Eli Vakil of Bar-Ilan University in Israel.
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