Does the combination of physical, cognitive and social activities help to prevent dementia

What is it about?

Prevention of dementia is a public health priority. Physical activity (PA) can reduce the risk of dementia, but the majority of people remain sedentary. We conducted a study with older adults (60+ years). We hypothesized that an evidence-based, multimodal and multicomponent PA intervention – GESTALT-kompakt – would lead to significantly larger improvements in PA levels, cognitive functions and social activities, compared to an active control group. Data were collected at baseline and after 3 and 12 months. The intervention group received a 12-week (1/week) multimodal and multicomponent PA program, which combined PA with cognitive and social activities. The control group received either regular gymnastics or cognitive training (1/week). Marginally significant differences were observed in the intervention group (n=57) in comparison to the control group (n=30), regarding improvements in PA (difference of mean changes =866.4 steps, p=0.055) after 3 months. However, their PA decreased again back to the baseline score value after 12 months (-866.0 steps, p=0.061). GESTALT-kompakt did not cause significant differences in cognitive functioning (-0.8620, p=0.074) and social activities (-0.2428, p=0.288) in comparison to the control intervention. GESTALT-kompakt might be effective in increasing PA in the short term, but did not have a long-term impact on the PA levels, cognitive functions or social activities of the participants. We recommend PA programs with longer duration to change behavior in the long term.

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Why is it important?

- standardized physical activity program for dementia prevention - combination of physical, cognitive and social activities (multicomponent) - combination of physical activity program and physical activity coaching (multimodal)

Perspectives