Fitness Files: Sweat away the threat of Alzheimer’s

As I left a meeting, a charming lady stopped me and said, “I never miss reading your Friday ‘Fitness Files,’ and there’s a lecture you gotta hear, ‘The Brain and Exercise.’ ” It was free, she said, at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

If you tell me you read my articles, I’ll do anything you say. So I showed up at UCI MIND’s lecture series, with Dr. Laura Baker of the Wake Forest School of Medicine, in North Carolina, speaking on “Exercise for the Brian: Is it Worth the Sweat?”

In introducing Baker, Dr. Carl Cotman, founder of UCI MIND, almost gave away the answer, but not quite.

First, he told us that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend 150 minutes of exercise weekly, but that people ages 20 to 29 get less than 30 minutes and those in their 80s get a paltry 15.

“Sitting is the new smoking,” he said, describing Americans’ 50-year decline in active lifestyle.

Exercise lowers the risk for heart disease, cholesterol and Type 2 diabetes, and improves blood flow and mood and reduces stress, he reminded us.

But Baker’s study demonstrated that there’s even more than these oft-listed physiological benefits. To show the “brain benefit,” she assembled 71 sedentary adults ages 55 to 89, all of whom were diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

MCI is described as memory problems greater than normal age-related forgetting.

Although not all people diagnosed with MCI progress to Alzheimer’s, the progress is tragic for those who do, with loss of brain cells and severe shrinkage of the brain, along with characteristic plaques and tangles. And with those losses comes a greatly diminished ability to care for oneself.

“Not a single drug is effective in stopping or slowing the progressive nature of the disease,” Baker told us.

But Baker’s study found something that is effective. Her study divided a carefully matched group, all of whom had a high likelihood of progressing to Alzheimer’s, into two groups.

Both exercised for 45 to 60 minutes four times a week for six months. One group received classes in stretching. The other had aerobic training with a personal trainer at a gym. The aerobic group exercised at 70% to 80% of maximum heart rate, while the stretching group exercised below 35% of maximum heart rate.

Baker described the results at the end of six months. Participants had spinal taps analyzing their cerebrospinal fluid, indicating the presence of a protein marker for the tangles associated with Alzheimer’s. The protein decreased with exercise, showing a decline in the tangles.

Baker emphasized, “No study with medication has been able to decrease the protein marker associated with Alzheimer’s.”

Only in the exercise group did scans reveal a brain volume increase rather than the expected further brain shrinkage. The parietal lobe, frontal lobe and hippocampus increased in size, together with “key areas that connect these three,” she said. These gains in brain weight affect “executive function” — the ability to plan, initiate, multitask and focus.

It’s possible that the increased blood flow to the brain’s memory and processing centers that accompanied the high-intensity exercise was responsible for the gains.

“This is real,” said Baker, “and dose is important.” Dose in exercise means exercising at 70% to 80% of maximum heart rate four times a week for 45 minutes to an hour.

Participants in the stretching group probably benefited in flexibility and balance, but tangles in their brains increased, brain weight decreased and their dementia progressed.

Dr. Frank La Ferla, director of UCI MIND’s prestigious Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, says the incidence of Alzheimer’s doubles every five years after 65, so that after 85 about half of us will have the mind-stealing disease.

None of us wants to be counted in that number. What we want in our senior years is independence, continued ability to care for ourselves, to maintain as much of the cognitive essence of our personalities as possible.

If a pill would accomplish the reversal of dementia’s progress, people would take it.

But we do not have a pill.

Instead, Baker prescribes a timed dose of vigorous activity as medication. She has the research to show it works.

I suspect you agree that for holding off the progress of Alzheimer’s, exercise is definitely worth the sweat.

Newport Beach resident CARRIE LUGER SLAYBACK is a 72-year-old marathoner who brought home first places in LA Marathons 2013 and 2014 and the Carlsbad Marathon 2015. She lives in Newport Beach.