Health and Fitness Goals for 2014

http://able2know.org/topic/140411-1

Here we are again.
List your goals for 2014, Physical and Mental, then drop by here
once in awhile to let us know how you are doing.

Early Fitness Can Improve the Middle-Age Brain

The more physically active you are at age 25, the better your thinking tends to be when you
reach middle age, according to a large-scale new study. Encouragingly, the findings also suggest
that if you negligently neglected to exercise when young, you can start now and still improve
the health of your brain.

Those of us past age 40 are generally familiar with those first glimmerings of forgetfulness and
muddled thinking. We can’t easily recall people’s names, certain words, or where we left the car
keys. “It’s what we scientists call having a C.R.S. problem,” said David R. Jacobs, a professor of
public health at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a co-author of the new study.
“You can’t remember stuff.”

But these slight, midlife declines in thinking skills strike some people later or less severely than
others, and scientists have not known why. Genetics almost certainly play a role, most researchers
agree. Yet the contribution of lifestyle, and in particular of exercise habits, has been unclear.

So recently, Dr. Jacobs and colleagues from universities in the United States and overseas turned
to a large trove of data collected over several decades for the Cardia study. The study, whose name
is short for Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults, began in the mid-1980s with the
recruitment of thousands of men and women then ages 18 to 30 who underwent health testing to
determine their cholesterol levels, blood pressure and other measures. Many of the volunteers
also completed a treadmill run to exhaustion, during which they strode at an increasingly brisk pace
until they could go no farther. The average time to exhaustion among these young adults was 10
minutes, meaning that most were moderately but not tremendously fit.

Twenty-five years later, several thousand of the original volunteers, now ages 43 to 54, were asked
to repeat their treadmill run. Most quit much sooner now, with their running times generally lasting
seven minutes or less, although a few ran longer in middle age than they had as relative youngsters.

Then, the volunteers completed a battery of cognitive tests intended to measure their memory
and executive function, which is the ability to make speedy, accurate judgments and decisions.
The volunteers had to remember lists of words and distinguish colors from texts, so that when, for
example, the word “yellow” flashed onto a screen in green ink, they would note the color, not
the word. (The participants did not undergo similar memory tests in their 20s.)