Every weekday afternoon, Harvard neurologist Jasmeer Chhatwal gets up from his desk, heads out of the office, and walks about three-quarters of a mile to get a cup of coffee from a neighborhood cafe.
There’s a perfectly good coffee maker in the office, but the afternoon ritual isn’t (just) about caffeine. The 20-minute stroll is helping to stave off symptoms of brain aging like memory loss, according to Chhatwal’s research.
His latest study, published November 3 in Nature Medicine, helps pinpoint how little movement you can get away with and still see benefits for the brain.
The goal? 5,000 steps a day — around two miles.
“People don’t need to run marathons,” Chhatwal told Business Insider. “In terms of things that you can do for yourself and your brain, this is a pretty easy one.”
Here’s why walking may help to make your mind more resilient to aging, and how to get the most out of your daily steps.
Why walking is linked to better brain health
Your risk of cognitive decline as you age can be influenced by your lifestyle, your genetics, and even the environment around you.
But increasingly, researchers are finding that a higher risk doesn’t make Alzheimer’s inevitable — and small lifestyle changes may have a huge impact.
The latest study, led by Chhatwal and colleagues from Harvard Medical School and Mass General Brigham, looked at nearly 300 cognitively healthy adults between the ages of 50 and 90.
To understand how their brains changed over time, the researchers scanned for key markers of Alzheimer’s risk, including deposits of amyloid and tau proteins, which can accumulate over time and disrupt nerve cells.
Amyloid tends to show up in the brain first, sometimes many years before symptoms develop. Tau, which appears later, has been linked to the development of memory loss, behavioral changes, and cognitive decline.
Using brain scans, they found that people who got between 5,000 and 7,000 steps a day had a healthier, better-functioning brain over time, and a slower build-up of disease-causing tau protein, compared with people who were more sedentary.
That was true even for people who started the study with higher levels of amyloid plaque build-up in their brains already.
For this high-risk group, even a little activity paid off, with benefits starting around 3,000 steps per day (roughly a mile and a quarter).
While previous research has linked exercise to lower Alzheimer’s risk, this study stands out because it followed participants for up to 14 years to see how changes in their brains slowly developed.
Chhatwal is excited to move this research along, to refine the benefits even more — especially for people who are at high risk for Alzheimer’s.
But, for now, he is keen to spread the word that this study suggests it’s not too late to get more active for a healthier brain, and every little bit counts.
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