Regular exercise or physical activity would not only reduce the risk of cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease patients but also improve their condition, said researchers in the Alzheimer's Association International Conference on Thursday, July 23.

Three different studies, namely: vascular cognitive impairment, aerobic exercise in Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment, presented in the conference supported the positive effect of exercise in treating Alzheimer's disease.

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Laura Baker of the Wake Forest School of Medicine, who led one of the studies on Alzheimer's disease, said that indulging in aerobic exercise regularly would act as a fountain of youth as far as the brain is concerned, according to Huffington Post.

Maria Carrillo, chief science officer for the Alzheimer's Association noted that "Exercise or regular physical activity might play a role in both protecting your brain from Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, and also living better with the disease if you have it." She also added that "It's the first time that we can see that exercise can actually enable one to live better with this disease," according to NBC news.

Dr. Steen Hasselbalch, and colleagues from the Danish Dementia Research Centre (DDRC), studied 200 people with the disease aged between 50 and 90 where one set of patients were allowed to perform aerobic exercises and the other group remained in the regular care for a period of 16 weeks.

It was observed at the end of 16 weeks that the group that did regular exercise had little neuropsychiatric symptoms than the control group that did no work out. Significant improvement on the mental speed as well as physical fitness, physical function, exercise self-efficacy and dual-task performance were found to have improved among patients that did exercises regularly, reported PR Newswire.

"Symptoms such as anxiety, irritability, and depression that often occur in Alzheimer's disease are the cause of great distress in both caregivers and people with the disease," Hasselbalch said. "While our results need to be verified in larger and more diverse groups, the positive effects of exercise on these symptoms that we saw in our study may prove to be an effective complement or combination with anti-dementia drugs. This calls for further study of multimodal treatment strategies, including lifestyle and drug therapies."

TagsAlzheimer's Disease, exercise, Physical activity, Cognitive decline, depression