Submitted by Jennifer Salter on
More good news from this research is that increasing activity helps even when people are over the age of 80, since the average age of study subjects was 82. Moreover, every movement counts—even activities as simple as cooking, playing cards or washing dishes.
Subjects included 716 older men and women without dementia who were participating in the Rush Memory and Aging Project, based at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. The majority of participants were women, and subjects volunteered to take part, so findings were not necessarily representative of the general population. That being said, just six months of increased physical activity was shown to improve memory, language, thinking and judgment problems by almost 50 per cent!