Board-certified neurologist with fellowship training in neuroimaging, and a clinical focus on brain health, cognitive aging, and the modifiable risk factors for dementia.
Brain Health
The famous walking studies never replicated, but one form of exercise did move both cognition and brain structure together: lifting weights, in people already showing mild cognitive impairment. Here is the strongest single signal in the whole pillar, described precisely, and where it stops.
Brain Health
The famous 2011 finding that walking grew the hippocampus faced the test every result must pass: could another team reproduce it? Across the replication decade, the larger and longer trials cut it down to its honest size. Exercise did not rebuild the aging brain, but it slowed what age takes.
Brain Health
For the first time, researchers randomized older adults to exercise and looked straight at the brain. A year of walking appeared to grow the hippocampus by two percent, the most cited exercise-and-brain finding ever published. Here is what it showed, and what it left unsettled.
Brain Health
By 2005, researchers knew active people got less dementia but couldn't prove exercise was the cause. Two cohort studies tried to design around that problem by measuring activity decades before diagnosis. Here is how well it worked, and where it still fell short.
Brain Health
The five-pillar framework begins with physical activity. This series works through the evidence in the order it arrived, starting at the turn of the millennium with the early cohort studies that made the case that active people get less dementia, and why that link was never proof of cause.
Brain Health
Most brain-health advice is a mix of good evidence and confident guesswork. This publication separates the two, one modifiable risk factor at a time. Here is the five-pillar framework it uses, drawn from the largest prevention studies, and the standard of proof each pillar will be held to.