Training your brain and body

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Health Report 28 min 3 speakers 4 chapters transcribed 3 days ago

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What is the overall focus of this Health Report episode on brain and body?

Norman Swan 0:00

Hello and welcome to this week's Health Report with me, Norman Swann. Today a special programme on the brain and body, perfect for the new year, and bringing together highlights on exercise, brain training and well-being from 2019. First, some good news to announce when it comes to delaying the onset of Alzheimer's disease and dementia, even in people who seem to be at increased risk because of the buildup of dementia related substances in the brain called amyloid beta and tau. There is a drug you can take. It's called exercise. Jasmine Chutwell is a neurologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Jasmine Chutwell 0:36

We know that from your late twenties and early thirties, you start to lose uh brain tissue volume. The question is how much and where. And one of the neat things with this particular study was that we were able to look at how brain volumes changed on MRI. over years and by doing that we could actually quantify, examine the the protective effect of physical activity. And one other neat thing that came out of this was that the protective effects of physical activity were actually greater than people that had high amyloid burdens in the brains. A lot of people would call that preclinical Alzheimer's disease. So these are people that are most at risk.

How does the Harvard study link physical activity to reduced Alzheimer’s risk?

Jasmine Chutwell 1:08

People who are at high risk have high amyloid burdens. What do they do? We don't have disease modifying therapies. I think that physical activity is certainly one way. And when we sort of looked also at cardiovascular risk. And how that fit in with physical activity. So

Norman Swan 1:21

just describe the study to

Jasmine Chutwell 1:22

us. We took about a hundred and eighty people from a study called the Harvard Aging Brain Study, which is a longitudinal study of preclinical Alzheimer's disease and and aging.

Norman Swan 1:34

Exactly. So we start scans on them as you go along.

Jasmine Chutwell 1:38

Yeah, the ABLE study. So These individuals now we've been following for somewhere between three and seven or eight years. And people had PET imaging at the beginning of the study to get a very precise idea of what uh their amyloid burdens were at baseline and we could use that as a predictor of how people did over time. But we also have data. Actually, PET scans are really versatile, so they can look at the metabolism, but you can also use a tracer which binds to the amyloid protein in the brain.

Norman Swan 2:09

And you obviously took a lot of measures of these people's lifestyles and so on and looking at their exercise levels and followed them through. Were they all experiencing cognitive decline or only some?

Jasmine Chutwell 2:20

at the study entry everyone is cognitively normal. Uh people that have high uh amyloid burdens, we know from other studies, are at particular risk of declining and indeed When we look at people's cognitive performance over time, it's the people with high amyloid burdens that tend to do worse over time.

Norman Swan 2:35

And just what was the relationship between exercise and how well they did?

Jasmine Chutwell 2:40

It was pretty profound actually. So people that were more active, and I'll talk in a second about how active that was, were able to see quite a bit of protection so that they were looking Starting to look fairly similar to people that had n normal amyloid burns that didn't have elevated amyloid burns. That was true both with respect to cognitive testing, but also with respect to brain volumes. You know, that's a very tangible measurement to

Norman Swan 3:03

be clear here. Their cognitive status, their ability to think and their memory and so on was protected. Did it reverse?

Jasmine Chutwell 3:12

It didn't reverse. So people showed very little decline over time in the higher activity portion of the high amyloid group. There was some decline over time and that's to be expected with aging. Um but it wasn't the drastic sort of decline that you sometimes see in the beginning of Alzheimer's disease.

Norman Swan 3:25

One of the issues in Alzheimer's disease is that it's often mixed with what's called vascular dementia. In other words, you've got atherosclerosis in the brain, as well as the Alzheimer's. In fact, it may be causative, but that's for another interview. And people who exercise, they smoke less, they're probably weigh less, they eat better.