Physical activity for cognitive health across the lifespan: when, what and how?

• Physical activity for cognitive health across the lifespan: when, what and how?Physical activity appears crucial to wellbeing, and is commonly linked to our physical health. Increasingly however, physical activity is acknowledged to also play a crucial role for mental, cognitive, and brain health throughout the lifespan. Speakers in this session will address the role of physical activity across three broad life stages, childhood, adulthood and older age. The session will present the evidence around physical activity for cognitive and brain health, and considerations for what and how physical activity can be delivered for optimal outcomes at different life stages.Physical activity may benefit mental, cognitive, and brain health through several mechanisms. Reducing potential harm through chronic disease reduction, transiently improving mood via alterations at the cellular and molecular levels, providing a means for skill development and social interaction, and bathing the brain in a rich neurotropic environment are the main means through which cognitive benefits from physical activity are proposed.The impact of physical activity on cognitive and brain function can be also considered from both an acute and chronic perspective. Beneficial chronic adaptations may come from the repeated exposure to positive acute physical activity responses, but how should physical activity be dosed for these important long-term benefits? This session will provide the latest updates in the area and suggest future directions for the field to emerge.Speaker 1Title:  Physical activity effects on cognitive and brain health in school age children Speaker Last Name: HillmanSpeaker First Name: CharlesSex: MaleAcademic title: ProfessorUniversity: Northeastern UniversityDepartment: Psychology; Physical Therapy, Movement, & Rehabilitation SciencesCountry: USAEmail: c.hillman@northeastern.eduPhysical activity (PA) can improve physical, mental, cognitive, and brain health throughout the lifespan. During childhood, the benefits of PA for cognitive and brain health have been increasingly studied, with evidence indicating enhanced executive function and improved academic performance, along with adaptations to underlying brain structure and function in specific regions and networks that support these aspects of cognition. Such findings are especially relevant given that there is a growing public health burden of unhealthy behaviors (e.g., physical inactivity, excessive energy intake) among children of industrialized nations. In recent years, children have become increasingly inactive, leading to concomitant increases in the prevalence of being overweight and unfit. Poor PA behaviors during childhood often track throughout life and have implications for the prevalence of several chronic diseases during adulthood. Particularly troubling is the absence of public health concern for the effect of physical inactivity on cognitive and brain health. It is curious that this has not emerged as a larger societal issue, given its clear relation to childhood obesity and other health disorders that have captured public attention. Relative to cognitive and brain health, the literature has predominantly focused on preadolescent children, with a comparatively smaller body of evidence in preschool age and adolescent children. Such a contrast is even more striking relative to the use of neuroimaging tools to assess PA on brain health. To date, the vast majority of neuroimaging studies have investigated preadolescent children, using electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging, and found that PA and aerobic fitness benefit neural structures and networks that support executive function and memory, including the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. Such findings have been linked to cognitive outcomes including aspects of executive function such as inhibition, working memory, and mental flexibility as well as other cognitive outcomes including relational memory and academic achievement.Despite evidence that PA promotes cognitive and brain health during development, a growing number of schools have minimized PA opportunities across the school day. Accordingly, this generation of children have become increasingly inactive, contributing to public health and educational concerns. By dedicating time to active play, sports, physical education, and other forms of PA, children are best-positioned to thrive in both the physical and cognitive domains. Such discoveries are timely and important for public health concerns related to chronic disease prevention as a function of childhood inactivity and obesity. These findings link pervasive societal concerns with brain health and cognition, and have implications for the educational environment and the context of learning.Speaker 2Title:  Building a cognitive reserve during adulthood: what is the prescription? Speaker Last Name: RattraySpeaker First Name: BenSex: MaleAcademic title: ProfessorUniversity: University of CanberraDepartment: Sport and Exercise ScienceCountry: AustraliaEmail: ben.rattray@canberra.edu.au During adulthood, healthy individuals typically report few cognitive complaints. As a result, the role of physical activity in cognitive health either receives little attention or finds very few relationships. This is likely also a result of the cognitive engagement many adults have through education, vocational, and social settings. There are however observations that physical activity during adulthood does impact later life. Physical activity for cognitive health during early and middle adulthood therefore focuses on general health, reducing the potential harm to brain structures and processes that are associated with several lifestyle-related diseases.Outside of reducing harm through physical health, physical activity may play a crucial role in building a cognitive reserve, potentially improving cognitive performance, but importantly protecting against later-life declines. Taking advantage of physical activity benefits, such as increases in cerebral blood flow and neurotrophic factors, offers an opportunity to maximise neural plasticity. In this session optimising the dose characteristics of physical activity will be discussed.Interventions that specifically attempt to take advantage of plasticity-supporting physical activity are those that ensure cognitive activity is in close temporal proximity. Sequentially- or concurrently-programming physical exercise with a cognitive intervention are gaining popularity, with most evidence currently in older adults. This session will provide an update on the latest evidence for concurrent training in healthy adulthood.It is hypothesized that an increased availability of factors such as brain-derived neurotrophic factor during targeted cognitive interventions improve the gains that such training can provide. However, depending on the outcome, some propose that concurrent activity may also work through the combination of effortful behaviours impacting individuals’ capacity, or tolerance for work. This fatigue-linked pathway may also impact cognitive health when engaged over longer periods, or when individuals are asked to report subjective cognitive complaints. These potential pathways will also be discussed in terms of informing the when, what, and how of physical activity interventions for cognitive health.Speaker 3Title:  How physical activity affects cognitive health in older adultsSpeaker Last Name: EkblomSpeaker First Name: MariaSex: FemaleAcademic title: ProfessorUniversity: Swedish School of Sport and Health SciencesDepartment: Physical Activity and HealthCountry: SwedenEmail: maria.ekblom@gih.se There is consistent evidence to suggest that being more fit in young adulthood is associated to having better cognitive function in both young and older adulthood. We also know that being aerobically high fit is associated with having executive abilities that make it easier to attain and sustain healthy habits. While such information may be interesting, it tells us very little on whether physical activity promotion among low fit inactive individuals might have a positive influence on their future cognitive health. In midlife, lack of time is a commonly perceived barrier towards physical activity. Still, as we retire, individuals who were inactive in midlife tend to stay inactive after retiring, despite now having more spare time at hand. When preaching that it is never too late, we need to take care not to shame those whose shoes we have not walked in. Remember, that although we have all equal human value, we have different opportunities, both genetically and in terms of socioeconomic circumstances. When we compare the brain health of senior athletes to that of their less active peers, this is not helping anyone. That is why I prefer randomized controlled trials for the purpose of figuring out what type of exercise might work for whom. The Finnish Geriatric Intervention Study to Prevent Cognitive Impairment and Disability evaluated whether a 2-year multicomponent intervention with exercise, cognitive training, diet and vascular risk monitoring could slow down the cognitive decline in an at-risk population. They show that such intervention actually can have small effects on the trajectories of cognitive decline, but we are still not close to understanding what the active component is. Large scale exercise RCTs using advanced neuroimaging to investigate neurophysiological mechanisms are under way, but these are very expensive. Major breakthroughs in plasma biomarkers of neurodegenerative disease progression have been exposed recently. Such new techniques should be exploited in future RCTs by researchers who want to investigate if support to increased physical activity can really change the cognitive trajectories of physically inactive individuals who want to spare their brain health. This presentation will explore our current understanding of how and phy

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MEDICIN OCH HÄLSOVETENSKAP  -- Annan medicin och hälsovetenskap (hsv//swe)

MEDICAL AND HEALTH SCIENCES  -- Other Medical and Health Sciences (hsv//eng)

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