Exercise improves older adults' memory

The hippocampus is a brain structure involved in all forms of memory formation.

“The results of our study are particularly interesting in that they suggest that even modest amounts of exercise by sedentary older adults can lead to substantial improvements in memory and brain health,” said Art Kramer, director of the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois and the senior author.

“Such improvements have important implications for the health of our citizens and the expanding population of older adults worldwide.”

For their project, scientists recruited 120 sedentary older people without dementia and randomly placed them in one of two groups—those who began an exercise regimen of walking around a track for 40 minutes a day, three days a week, or those limited to stretching and toning exercises.

The results showed that the aerobic exercise group demonstrated an increase in volume of the left and right hippocampus of 2.12 per cent and 1.97 per cent, respectively.

The same regions of the brain in those who did stretching exercises decreased in volume by 1.40 and 1.43 per cent, respectively.