Household Tasks & Brain Aging

Researchers followed 876 people over age 65 for more than 10 years. The study was designed to identify links between household physical activity and brain health in older adults. Participants were asked how much time they spent cooking, shopping, cleaning up, caregiving, and doing housework and yard work, etc. After five years, participants were given tests of memory and thinking skills along with brain scans. Participants who were at least moderately active could remember more words from a list and could perform simple tasks more quickly. Regardless of how much exercise they did, people who did more household chores had larger brains. The study was designed to identify links between household physical activity and brain health in older adults. Participants who were at least moderately active could remember more words from a list and could perform simple tasks more quickly. Regardless of how much physical exercise they did, participants who did more household chores had larger brains. This was identified in the hippocampi, the brain’s two search engines, vital to learning and memory—and in the two frontal lobes of the brain, involved in many areas of critical thinking including executive functions such as making decisions, solving problems, accessing willpower, etc. More tomorrow.