Walking faster may slow the onset of dementia in people who are starting to show signs of cognitive impairment, a new analysis of over 900 older adults suggests.
Researchers say gait speed, especially how powerfully the legs push, can change the risk of cognitive decline in people most vulnerable to dementia.
The neurological condition affects roughly 50 million people worldwide, scientists say, and the number may triple by 2050 to around 150 million.
While some new drugs treat early-stage Alzheimer’s dementia, they remain inefficient at slowing the epidemic at a population level.
A growing body of research suggests that markers like gait speed, handgrip strength, and leg-muscle power can help identify the onset of dementia years before diagnosis. These parameters are linked to the executive function of the brain, the suite of mental skills governing planning, self-control, and the ability to switch between tasks.
Now, researchers say these markers are not just correlations but may moderate cognitive decline in older adults.
For the new analysis, researchers recruited nearly 900 people aged 60 to 85 through town halls and mailings and media campaigns in Spain’s Basque Country. The participants all had high dementia risk scores and subtle cognitive weaknesses but were without dementia, making them a window into the preclinical stage of cognitive decline.
They were first given a series of cognitive tests and then made to walk a distance of six metres at usual pace, with an encoder capturing peak lower-limb power during explosive contractions and a handheld dynamometer measuring maximal grip force.
Researchers analysed the findings after adjusting them for sex, socioeconomic status, body mass index, depressive symptoms, anxiety, diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidaemia, and smoking. They found that the impact of old age on brain function began to decline above a gait speed of 1.59 metres per second and became undetectable at 1.83 metres a second.
The impact of age on brain function similarly became undetectable when handgrip strength increased to 48.8kg and leg power to 438 watts.
However, the moderating effect of gait speed appeared confined to men, of whom only 14 per cent in the study could manage a gait speed over 1.59 metres per second.
“In older adults at increased dementia risk, higher physical performance was associated with a weaker relationship between age and executive function, independent of socioeconomic, emotional, body composition and cardiovascular factors,” they said in a study published in the Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle.
Researchers, however, cautioned that the numbers were not clinical cut-offs ready for the doctor’s office.
They called for further studies conducted over longer durations to test whether “maintaining high physical performance helps preserve executive function and inform preventive strategies”.
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