Exercise May Help Preserve Memory in Older Adults

Jan. 31, 2010— -- For older patients, there's no need to jog the memory -- a simple walk will do, researchers say.

Among patients in their mid-60s, walking three times a week for a year upped the volume of the hippocampus, which plays an important role in memory, according to Dr. Arthur Kramer of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Urbana, Ill., and colleagues.

On the other hand, control participants who took stretching classes saw drops in the volume of the hippocampus, Kramer and colleagues reported online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings suggest that it's possible to overcome age-related declines in hippocampal volume with only moderate exercise, Kramer told MedPage Today, leading to better fitness and perhaps to better spatial memory.

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"I don't see a down side to it," he said.

The volume of the hippocampus is known to fall with age by between 1-2 percent a year, the researchers noted, leading to impaired memory and increased risk for dementia. But animal research suggests that exercise reduces the loss of volume and preserves memory.

To test the effect on humans, they enrolled 120 men and women in their mid-60s and randomly assigned 60 of them to a program of aerobic walking three times a week for a year. The remaining 60 were given stretch classes three times a week and served as a control group.

Their fitness and memory were tested before the intervention, again after six months, and for a last time after a year. Magnetic resonance images of their brains were taken at the same times in order to measure the effect on the hippocampal volume.

The study showed that overall the walkers had a 2 percent increase in the volume of the hippocampus, compared with an average loss of about 1.4 percent in the control participants.

As well, the researchers found, improvements in fitness, measured by exercise testing on a treadmill, were significantly associated with increases in the volume of the hippocampus.