People who have poor fitness in young or middle age can have more rapid brain aging 20 years later, said Nicole Spartano, a researcher from the Boston University School of Medicine and lead author of the study.
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Between 1979 and 1983, at the baseline examination, Framingham Offspring participants with an average age of 40 years had an exercise treadmill test. Twenty years later (1998-2001), at the follow-up examination, participants – now an average age of 58 years old – had an abbreviated treadmill test as well as MRI brain scans.
The study, published online by the journal Neurology, also showed that people whose blood pressure and heart rate went up at a higher rate during exercise also were more likely to have smaller brain volumes two decades later. When those participants were excluded, every eight units lower was associated with shrinkage equivalent to one year of accelerated brain aging. Exercise systolic BP correlated with smaller TCBV in individuals with prehypertension or hypertension at baseline (P 0.05). Furthermore, people who had very high heart rates during the tests also had smaller brains later in life. “This indicates accelerated brain ageing”. The heart rates of each volunteer during the exercise task were used to estimate the rate at which their body used oxygen, also called “exercise capacity”, as a measure of their fitness. This is said to be because keeping fit reduces blood pressure, thus resulting in less strain on the brain.
“This message may be especially important for people with heart disease or at risk for heart disease, in whom we found an even stronger relationship between fitness and brain aging”, Spartano added by email.
The researchers say their work can’t yet prove a cause-and-effect between inactivity and brain size and aging.
The study adds to growing evidence that heart health can affect brain health in later life. The average age was around 40, and participants didn’t have cardiovascular disease, stroke or dementia when the research began and were not taking beta-blockers.
Past research has shown a link between physical activity and brain health, but many of those studies were conducted short-term and in the elderly.
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Findings from the current study offer more evidence that the choices people make in their 40s can impact brain health later in life, said Scott Hayes, a researcher at Boston University and the Memory Disorders Research Center at VA Boston Healthcare System.
