What about exercise and meditation for elders worried about their cognitive function?

My friend Ron Louie is a pediatric oncologist and fulltime caregiver for his wife who has Alzheimer’s disease. He blogs regularly, often drawing intriguing comparisons of the search for an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s with the more successful advancements in cancer treatment. His post today is about a paper in JAMA this week that I had been considering writing about. Since he has already done a much better job than I could have done, I am providing the link to his post, with his kind permission. I urge you to read it.

Briefly, the paper in JAMA reports on a well-designed, prospective clinical trial of two interventions, exercise and/or meditation, on cognitive decline in elderly subjects (64 to 84 years old). All subjects had noticed trouble with memory or concentration, but all still had normal cognitive testing at the study onset. No cognitive benefit from exercise or mediation was seen compared to the control group after six months, but importantly, no cognitive decline was noted in the control group either. My take-home message is not that exercise and meditation are ineffective in slowing cognitive decline. Rather the study suggests that intervention trials in mildly symptomatic subjects in the future will need to be 1) much longer in duration and 2) more homogenous in terms of the underlying pathology, perhaps through the use of biomarkers.