Exercise helps protect Hispanic adults from late life cognitive decline

Physical activity and controlling blood sugar in midlife are associated with a significantly slower rate of cognitive decline later, with exercise particularly beneficial for Hispanics, new research from UT Health San Antonio, the academic health center of The University of Texas at San Antonio, suggests.

While cardiovascular issues at midlife are known to contribute to cognitive decline and dementia, the new study is among the first to examine those factors across ethnicities. It included 402 San Antonio participants, with 52% Hispanic and the remainder non-Hispanic white, and with a mean age of 57.9 and 58.5% women.

The results differed by ethnicity, with physical activity tied to slower cognitive decline especially for Hispanics, and lower fasting blood glucose levels associated with slower cognitive decline among non-Hispanic whites.

"By improving cardiovascular health through modifiable lifestyle changes, there is a potential to meaningfully alleviate the public health burden of Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, particularly in high-risk populations," said Claudia Satizabal, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences at UT Health San Antonio and its Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer's and Neurodegenerative Diseases, where she leads the Population Neuroscience Core.

She is co-senior author, along with Chen-Pin Wang, PhD, associate professor-research in the Department of Population Health Sciences, of the study titled, "Longitudinal association between midlife cardiovascular health and cognitive change in a bi-ethnic cohort," published July 23 by Alzheimer's & Dementia: Behavior & Socioeconomics of Aging.

The study authors all are with the Glenn Biggs Institute or The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

The study notes that an increase in global life expectancy combined with a higher proportion of older adults is leading to a higher prevalence of age-related conditions such as dementia, with currently 6.7 million individuals in the United States affected by Alzheimer's disease.

But there's a growing body of evidence suggesting that modifiable risk factors contribute substantially to cognitive decline and dementia, with recent estimates attributing nearly 40% of Alzheimer's cases to those factors. Cardiovascular health has emerged as having a principal role in brain aging.

The American Heart Association's Life's Simple 7 (LS7) framework, which encompasses three behavioral factors (healthy diet, non-smoking and physical activity) and four health factors (blood pressure, body mass index, total cholesterol and fasting blood glucose), offers an integrated metric of cardiovascular health and has been proposed as a strategy to promote optimal brain health, according to the study.

Previous studies have examined the associations between adherence to LS7 and cognitive outcomes, with findings suggesting that higher LS7 scores are associated with better cognitive performance, reduced dementia risk and improved brain health. However, those relationships aren't uniform across populations.

Notably, Hispanic older adults experience a disproportionate burden of Alzheimer's and related dementias, with numbers showing that 14% of Hispanic adults aged 65 or older have Alzheimer's, compared to 10% of non-Hispanic white older adults. Mexican Americans, the largest Hispanic population in the United States, carry particularly high rates of diabetes, obesity and dyslipidemia, all of which contribute to elevated risk of dementia.

Despite these disparities, the study notes, Hispanic populations remain underrepresented in Alzheimer's research, limiting the field's ability to understand risk trajectories and identify effective prevention strategies for all.