Portable motion tracking devices may be useful someday to provide early warnings of cognitive decline among older adults, new findings from researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggest.
The researchers analyzed data from ActiGraph activity monitors, which use an activity tracking sensor similar to those found on Fitbits and Apple watches, used by nearly 600 participants in a long-term community health study. older adults.
They found significant differences in movement patterns between participants with normal cognition and those with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease. These differences included less activity during the waking hours and more fragmented activity during the afternoons among participants with mild cognitive impairment / Alzheimer’s.
The results were published July 19 in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
We tend to think of physical activity as a potential therapy to slow down cognitive decline, but this study reminds us that cognitive decline in turn can slow down physical activity; and perhaps one day we will be able to monitor and detect these changes for earlier and more efficient testing. to delay and perhaps prevent the cognitive impairment that leads to Alzheimer’s ”.
Amal Wanigatunga, PhD, MPH, lead author of the study and associate scientist, Department of Epidemiology, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University
The recent introduction of portable activity monitoring devices, now used by tens of millions of people worldwide, has presented an important opportunity for health researchers to measure and track changes in physical movement.
The devices can provide automatic and objective measurements of daytime physical activity, sleep patterns, heart rate, and blood oxygen levels; and are typically connected to the Internet, allowing their manufacturers to create data sets that cover millions of users. Researchers previously did not have such an easy way to access such health-relevant data on such a large scale.
The aim of the new study was to determine whether the recorded activity patterns of a cohort of older adults differed significantly between the cognitively normal and the cognitively impaired. Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, is known to be a process that lasts for decades, and researchers generally expect future disease modification interventions to be more effective when started earlier in the course. of the disease.
If scientists could identify a distinctive change in activity that predicts slipping into mild cognitive impairment and finally Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, then, in principle, older people who show this change in activity more cognitive tests could be done; and, when available, previous treatment.
The study made use of data from a larger, ongoing health research project known as the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA), in which the National Institute on Aging has been studying thousands of people. in the Baltimore area since 1958. The analysis was based. in 585 BLSA participants for whom there were sufficient activity monitoring data and cognitive assessments available during the period July 2015 to December 2019. These included 36 participants with mild cognitive impairment or diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Adjusting for differences based on age, sex, and race, the researchers found that overall differences in measures of activity throughout the day were not very different between the mild / Alzheimer’s cognitive impairment groups. and normal cognition. However, when the researchers focused on activity patterns during certain hours of the day, some differences were revealed.
In the mornings (6–12 h) and even more so in the afternoons (12–18 h), the mild cognitive impairment / Alzheimer’s group had significantly lower measures of activity compared to the normal group. The most surprising finding was that “fragmentation” of activity, a break in activity over shorter periods of time, was 3.4 percent higher for participants with mild cognitive impairment / Alzheimer’s during afternoon period.
“Seeing this difference in the afternoons was interesting; one of the main symptoms of Alzheimer’s dementia is the phenomenon of ‘sun cavas’ which involves an increase in confusion and mood swings that start in the afternoon, and these activity markers may be capturing some movements related to these symptoms, “says Wanigatunga.
The findings, he notes, are preliminary due to the cross-cutting and “instantaneous” nature of the study design, although they support the idea that cognitive decline toward mild cognitive impairment and dementia is accompanied by changes in activity patterns.
He and his colleagues plan additional studies that participants will follow over time, to see if measurable but slight changes in daily activity patterns help capture the early symptoms of mild cognitive impairment and subsequent dementia. Alzheimer’s disease.
Source:
Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health
Magazine reference:
Wanigatunga, AA, et al. (2022) Patterns of Daily Physical Activity as a Window on Cognitive Diagnosis in the Longitudinal Study of Baltimore Aging (BLSA). Journal of Alzheimer’s disease. doi.org/10.3233/jad-215544.