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People in the study who walked more than 4,000 steps each day had superior performance in attention, information-processing speed and executive functioning.
For adults 60 and older, moderate daily walks improve attention and mental skills, UCLA study finds. Leigh Hopper - Walking more than 4,000 steps a day can improve attention and mental skills in adults 60 and older, according to UCLA research published December 12 in a preprint edition of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. Various studies have found that physical activity is important in preventing cognitive decline and dementia in older adults. Cognitive decline occurs when people start having difficulty reasoning, processing and remembering. Brain volume and brain thickness — both measured by neuroimaging methods — are different ways of quantifying the health of the brain. Previous research shows physical activity correlates with higher volume in the hippocampus, a small, memory-critical region deep within the brain. "Few studies have looked at how physical activity affects the thickness of brain structures," said Prabha Siddarth, the study's first author and a biostatistician at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA.
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