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Sidestepping dementia? Study says dancing may help

  There's this guy I dance with, Arnold Taylor.

He has firm hands and shoulders, and his favorite swing move has this merry-go-round feel to it. Everything in the periphery is a blur except his broad grin.

He's strong — a fact he underscores by introducing himself, with a wink, simply as "Ahnoldt." This faux Schwarzenegger's dance card is usually pretty full. And when he walks, it's more like he's swaggering to a syncopated beat.

It's easy to mistake this 78-year-old retired minister for a lady's man. But really, he's just reflecting the spiritual joy he gets from his favorite recreation.

Longtime dancers like Taylor know what the medical community is lately starting to find some evidence of: Dancing is good for you. Particularly for older people.

A recent study by the Albert Einstein Center in the Bronx, N.Y., found dancing to be the only regular physical activity associated with a significant drop in the incidence of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's, which slowly degrades brain and memory, affects 4 million Americans over age 60. Dementia, a broader category of diminished mental ability, affects between 6 million and 7 million.

"Dance is not purely physical in many ways, it also requires a lot of mental effort," said Joseph Verghese, the lead researcher of the study in June in the New England Journal of Medicine. Many studies have explored links between activity and dementia, he said, "... the (activities) that are purely physical do not seem to have any effect."

Let's dance! There are oodles of opportunities for dancing in our region.

In the Verghese study, subjects who danced three or four times a week showed 76 percent less incidence of dementia than those who danced only once a week or not at all. The same study showed that doing puzzles, mind games and other mentally stimulating activities also helps but that purely physical activities — swimming, bicycling, walking, climbing stairs — had no preventive value.

The results don't surprise Jamie Platt, 53, who likes folk dancing.

"I have a very sedentary job. But when I go dancing ... it keeps me vibrant. The dances that we do have complex footwork," Platt said. "It keeps you on the ball."

So what makes dance life- and brain-enhancing?

Verghese doesn't know.

True, it involves movement, and there are dozens of studies that show — even if the Einstein Center study didn't — a positive correlation between physical exercise and mental health. Essentially, exercise seems to jazz the brain.

Sustained aerobic activity involves not just the brain's motor and sensory functions but also the hippocampus, the section responsible for memory and many other cognitive functions, said Carl Cotman, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine.

Cotman studies the influence of exercise on rats and mice. In animals that exercise, the connections between brain cells grow stronger, and a protein that improves neuron survival increases.

Critics doubtful

The Einstein Center study has many critics.

"I think there is nothing unique about dance in particular that is beneficial for Alzheimer's," said Bill Thies, vice president of medical and scientific affairs for the Alzheimer's Association. "The numbers involved in (the Einstein Center) research are too small."

Verghese's study followed 469 people over age 75 — none of whom showed signs of dementia — from 1980 to 2001. Participants took a series of clinical and neuropsychological tests at enrollment and were then tested every 12 to 18 months. In this group, 130 people danced frequently (three or more times a week), 83 swam frequently, 26 bicycled frequently and 19 played games frequently.

Thies says a definitive study would track more than 10,000 people for a decade or more.

He's not the only critic. "There are inherent limitations to these kinds of studies because they are behavioral and self-selected," meaning this group included only those without a condition that would keep them off the dance floor," said David Bennett, a neurologist and director of the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Research Center in Chicago. "You don't see the people who are not dancing."

"It's difficult to determine whether something is acting on the brain when a person dances that actually reduces the risk of mental decline," Bennett said. "There may be something about dance that attracts a certain type of person who is less depressed, more social and less stressed," all qualities that could also help stave off dementia. More studies are needed, he said.

Research hasn't produced a consensus on what protects against dementia, either.

Some studies show that people with more education — and therefore, presumably, more developed brains — tend to be less likely to develop dementia.

Other studies link brain health with a healthful diet and good circulation. Still others suggest that people with depressive personalities are more prone to dementia later in life.

Signs of dementia

Dementia usually leaves markers. Brain scans sometimes show deposits of the protein amyloid, which essentially creates roadblocks for brain signals. Other people have plaques and tangles, knots of intertwined, dysfunctional nerve cells. Sometimes there are lesions on the brain tissue. Sometimes the brain shrinks.

A study published in July showed that overweight elderly women were more prone to Alzheimer's than those of lesser weight. Among 260 Swedish women, those who were overweight or obese at 70 were more likely than others of similar age to have dementia or Alzheimer's in their 80s.

"When you're considering a disease of late life, it's never one factor working in isolation," said Deborah Gustafson, whose research on Swedish women appeared in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Other common ailments such as heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes have also been linked to higher rates of dementia. "But we still found there's an independent effect between high body fat and dementia," said Gustafson.

Most dance burns fat.

Positive energy

Research may still be far from being able to prove that dance is good for aging minds. But it's hard to dispute that, on the whole, dancers have lots of positive energy.

Like Arnold Taylor. He danced through the Great Depression and World War II.

When he tells stories about his past in his usual animated fashion, he's generally talking about how he and his sister showed off their dance moves in the grange halls of western Massachusetts during the 1930s. Or about weekends in England in the 1940s hitting on girls at dances featuring the music of Tommy Dorsey and Duke Ellington. It's the dancing he remembers. The penny-pinching family budgets and the ravages of wartime London don't steal his story.

Who knows why some things — dance steps or brain power — come back, while others never do?

While science tries to identify whether it's the drugs we take, the diet we eat or the dances we do, maybe the sensible thing to do to stave off dementia is to hit the dance floor. It may not work, but it's lots of fun.