There’s another reason to exercise besides your heart or your waistline. New findings from a 35 year study show exercise reduces the risk of dementia.
“What the research shows is that following a healthy lifestyle confers surprisingly large benefits to health – healthy behaviors have a far more beneficial effect than any medical treatment or preventative procedure,” said Principle
Investigator Professor Peter Elwood from Cardiff University’s School of Medicine in a press release.
Overall the study identified five healthy behaviors as being integral to having the best chance of leading a disease-free lifestyle: regular exercise, not smoking, a low bodyweight, a healthy diet and a low alcohol intake.
The people who consistently followed four or five of these behaviors experienced a 60 percent decline in dementia and cognitive decline. However, researchers noted, exercise was the strongest mitigating factor.
There was also 70 percent fewer instances of diabetes, heart disease and stroke, compared with people who followed none of the healthy behaviors.
“The size of reduction in the instance of disease owing to these simple healthy steps has really amazed us and is of enormous importance in an aging population,” said Elwood.
Researchers analyzed data from the Caerphilly Cohort Study that involved 2,235 men aged 45-59 in Caerphilly, South Wales.
The study had multiple focuses, but one of the most important was to examine the relationship between healthy lifestyles, chronic disease and cognitive decline over a 35-year period.
“If the men had been urged to adopt just one additional healthy behavior at the start of the study 35 years ago, and if only half of them complied, then during the ensuing 35 years there would have been a 13 percent reduction in dementia, a 12 percent drop in diabetes, six percent less vascular disease and a five percent reduction in deaths,” said Elwood.
The post Reduce your dementia risk with exercise appeared first on Health2Fit.com.