What is nice on your heart is nice on your mind. Just as physical activity helps keep our bodies fit and robust as we age, it also helps maintain – and is even linked to – our cognitive function. Lower dementia risk.
Yet along with the long-term cognitive advantages of physical activity, exercise also produces a short-term boost in cognitive performance that lasts from minutes to hours. According to our latest research, this cognitive boost can last as long as 24 hours after exercise. Because some cognitive abilities begin to say no as we age, even a small increase in cognitive function may also help us stay lively and independent longer.
Studies conducted in each the lab and real-world settings have shown that people who find themselves more physically lively — whether that's in shape or not. Regular exercise Or they're simply more lively of their work. Everyday life – Perform higher on cognitive tests within the hours after exercise.
But one query researchers are still attempting to answer is how long these cognitive gains last — especially in older adults, where maintaining cognitive function is critical. This is the aim of our research.
i Our study In middle-aged and older adults, we found that those that did more moderate-vigorous physical activity (corresponding to jogging or cycling) performed higher on memory tests the following day. This suggests that the memory advantages of physical activity may last more than the previous couple of hours. A laboratory-based study.
Our study included 76 participants aged 50–83 years. Each participant wore a wrist-worn activity tracker for eight days and nights. They were instructed to go about their every day lives as normal. From these activity trackers, we were capable of see how much time participants spent sitting or being physically lively every day – and the way intense that physical activity was.
Because physical activity too Affects sleep quality. – specifically the period of time spent in deep and restorative sleep, often called slow-wave sleep – We were also focused on exploring the role of sleep in cognitive performance. We extracted sleep quality characteristics from activity trackers – including total sleep duration and time spent in slow-wave sleep.
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Each day the participants wore activity trackers, additionally they took a set of cognitive tests. Some of those cognitive tests assess episodic memory (having the ability to recall previous experiences) and dealing memory (the flexibility to temporarily store information within the brain). The variety of cognitive tests given to participants every day to cut back the likelihood of participants learning and remembering answers.
We desired to be certain that we disentangled the effect of physical activity and sleep on next-day cognitive performance. Therefore, we took under consideration several demographic, socioeconomic and lifestyle characteristics that might have distorted the outcomes. Each day, we also calculated a participant's retrospective cognitive rating to be certain that we were specializing in every day improvements in cognitive performance.
Enhancing memory
We found that the more time a participant spent doing moderate-intensity physical activity, the higher their episodic and dealing memory scores the following day. Getting more sleep, especially slow-wave sleep, was also related to improved memory scores—independently of physical activity. But those that were more sedentary had worse working memory the following day.
Although improvement in memory performance was relatively modest, none of our participants had cognitive impairment or dementia. So they realistically didn't have much room to enhance on these tests.
But the findings could function a jumping-off point for future studies that examine next-day cognitive performance in individuals with neurodegenerative diseases — corresponding to dementia, where we see big improvements in test scores. can These findings also should be replicated in a bigger study before we will be confident about them.
Exercise is assumed to have short-term cognitive advantages because exercise increases blood flow and the discharge of certain brain chemicals. Contribution to cognitive function. Generally, these neurochemical advantages are thought to last for a number of hours after exercise. However, other changes produced by exercise—including some Included in the memory function – Can last 24-48 hours after exercise. This may affect the outcomes present in our study.
Our findings point to the importance of maintaining an lively lifestyle as we age – and supporting that lively lifestyle with good sleep.