Link between walking speed and brain function

[TelopeaBlue]

No mention of ApoE in this open source paper but a correlation that may be interesting to our community regardless.

Question Is gait speed measured at age 45 years associated with accelerated biological aging, neurocognitive function, and cognitive decline?

Findings In this 5-decade cohort study of 904 participants in New Zealand, physical and biological indicators of accelerated aging, including compromised brain integrity (eg, reduced brain volume and cortical thickness), were associated with slow gait measured at age 45 years. Lifelong compromised brain health—including poor neurocognitive functioning as early as age 3 years and childhood-to-adulthood decline in cognitive functioning—was associated with slower gait at midlife.

Meaning Gait speed at midlife may be a summary index of lifelong aging with possible origins in childhood central nervous system deficits.

[NF52]

No mention of ApoE in this open source paper but a correlation that may be interesting to our community regardless.

Question Is gait speed measured at age 45 years associated with accelerated biological aging, neurocognitive function, and cognitive decline?

Findings In this 5-decade cohort study of 904 participants in New Zealand, physical and biological indicators of accelerated aging, including compromised brain integrity (eg, reduced brain volume and cortical thickness), were associated with slow gait measured at age 45 years. Lifelong compromised brain health—including poor neurocognitive functioning as early as age 3 years and childhood-to-adulthood decline in cognitive functioning—was associated with slower gait at midlife.

Meaning Gait speed at midlife may be a summary index of lifelong aging with possible origins in childhood central nervous system deficits.

Thanks for sharing this, TelopeaBlue!
Since this is an open source article, I'm going to share a bit more. First, I envy these researchers the level of data they had to analyze, going back to neurologists testing 3 year olds in 1975! It is tempting to look at such a rich data source and want to find something really important in these 900 or so people from Dunedin, New Zealand. Yet the authors recognize that the results raise more questions than they answer.

As someone who worked with children with special needs from birth to 21, I was not surprised at all by what they found as "remarkable", since children with early mild developmental differences may continue to show effects of those delays on later assessments, especially if they were not provided intervention or an enriched curriculum.

Remarkably, in our study, gait speed was associated not only with concurrent neurocognitive functioning in adulthood but also with neurocognitive functioning in early childhood. The effect sizes between participants in the slowest and fastest gait speed quintiles were far from trivial: at age 3 years, the difference in brain health was 0.62 SD.

[Note: S.D. means Standard Deviation; a standard deviation is just what it sounds like: the typical range of scores in an average population. So a child with a .62 SD in cognitive health would be similar to a child who has an IQ of 91, a .62 deviation within the normal range of 85-115 on an IQ test where the 50th percentile is 100. That may be a statistically significant difference, but any reputable psychologist would in fact consider it a "trivial" effect size difference]

The authors correctly note that many lifestyle and environmental factors may combine with genetic and health-related issues to lead to poor gait and associated (not causal) accelerate aging. Few of us on this forum would argue with their conclusion:

It is increasingly recognized that it might be easier to prevent aging-associated damage than to reverse it, suggesting that the effect of interventions to slow aging may work better if they are applied while people are still young and free of disease and disability. This necessitates a shift toward enrolling younger participants in antiaging trials, and with this shift, valid measures are required to identify risk groups that need intervention, and to track the course of outcome before the manifestation of age-related diseases.

Any school that wants to eliminate recess and cut PE time (or have it be over-regulated) needs to read that conclusion!