their physical activity increased, the 50 to 74-year-old volunteers performed better on an executive function task, whereas on days when their physical activity fell, their cognitive performance decreased as well. Raeanne Moore, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the study’s primary investigator, said, “The future of lifestyle interventions really needs to be remote-based. The pandemic has made this especially clear.” Moore added, “It was a very linear relationship. We hypothesized that we would find this, but we couldn’t be sure because we weren’t telling people to increase their physical activity. They just did what they do every day”.
First author Zvinka Zlatar, PhD, a clinical psychologist at UC San Diego School of Medicine, said, “Future interventions, in which we ask people to increase their physical activity, will help us determine if daily changes in physical activity lead to daily gains in cognition measured remotely or vice versa”. After adjusting for numerous co-morbidities such as HIV status, age, sex, education, and race/ethnicity, the association between physical activity and cognition persisted. However, this was done only for individuals who function dependently, who depend on others to do their daily activities such as managing household operations or bill payments.
Moore said, “For them, physical activity may have a greater benefit on daily, real-world cognitive performance”. This is a finding similar to research on Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Though it was outside the scope of this study, Moore speculated that as functionally independent adults are likely to engage in more cognitively stimulating and social activities, which have been shown to benefit brain health, physical activity may have a less noticeable effect on cognition.
Moore and Zlatar stated that their findings have implications for the creation of novel digital health interventions aimed at preserving brain health as people age. Zlatar said, “We don’t know yet if there’s a cumulative, long-term effect to these small daily fluctuations in cognition”. Zlatar added, “That’s something we plan to study next — to see if performing physical activity at different intensities over time, in unsupervised settings, can produce long-term improvements in brain health and sustained behavior change.”
