If you are given the choice of the stairs or an elevator (or perhaps a cable car), consider taking the stairs Less than 4 minutes of physical exertion a day – such as rushing for the bus or carrying heavy shopping – could halve your dementia risk. People who engaged in short bursts of vigorous movement were up to 48 per cent less likely to develop the condition than their sedentary counterparts in a large study. Exercise brings a myriad of benefits, from promoting muscle growth and staving off cardiovascular disease to enhancing mental health.
Yet many people find it hard to fit the recommended 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per week into their routines. This has caused interest to grow in the benefits of the incidental exercise people get through ordinary exertion, like walking up a hill or playing energetically with children. Recent studies have found that such short bursts of activity can help keep your heart healthy and add years to your life.
When it comes to cognition, just a couple of minutes of walking or stretching every hour has been linked to improved memory and attention span. Focusing on dementia risk, Koemel and his colleagues analysed data from 22,618 adults, who were mainly in their early 60s, from the UK Biobank study. None of the participants had a dementia diagnosis when they strapped on wrist-worn accelerometers to track their activity over seven days between 2013 and 2015.
The researchers looked in the data for sporadic instances of high-intensity effort, such as climbing stairs, carrying heavy shopping or rushing for the bus. The participants were followed for around eight years after they wore the accelerometer until whichever came first: a dementia diagnosis, death or the end of the follow-up period in November 2022. During the study, 170 of the participants were diagnosed with dementia.
The researchers found that 2.5 per cent of those who did no exercise at all developed the condition. Among people who didn’t set aside time to exercise, but managed a few daily bouts of vigorous lifestyle activity, 0.71 per cent developed dementia. The risk was lowest, at 0.59 per cent, among those who deliberately exercised alongside their daily exertions.
Overall, an accumulation of just 3.7 minutes per day of vigorous routine movement was associated with a 48 per cent lower dementia risk. It was also linked to larger volumes of grey matter in several brain regions, and shrinking of areas of abnormal brain tissue known as white matter hyperintensities. The study is observational, so it doesn’t prove that bursts of activity directly change dementia risk.
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