How Cycling Helps Your Brain Health

Cycling is an extremely healthy sport. This low impact aerobic exercise can strengthen your legs, improve your balance, and boost your fitness at any age.

But cycling is also good for your brain, according to Healthline. That’s because riding a bike helps to reduce feelings of stress and anxiety. But it could do even more.

New Research, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, studied 479,723 participants that included 13 years of follow-up. The findings suggested that active travel modes of transportation – especially cycling – was associated with better brain health and a lower risk of dementia.

Movement Patterns and Cognitive Health
The connection between exercise and brain health isn’t new but the study shows that there may be something unique about cycling when it is part of your daily routine, according to mindbodygreen.

The participants were asked how they usually got around in their daily lives other than the way they commute to work. There were four categories: people who used passive modes of transportation like buses or trains; people who usually walked, people who mixed walking with other forms of transportation; and people who rode a bike or combined bike riding with other forms of transportation.

The researchers found that the participants who cycled on a regular basis had a 19 percent lower risk of dementia and a 22 percent lower risk of Alzheimer’s.

Brain imaging of the study participants also showed that the people who cycled had a larger hippocampus; which is an indication of healthy cognitive function.

Practical Way to Reduce Dementia Risk
Active travel like cycling is something most people can do and the benefits to older adults is tremendous, according to Medical News Today.

“Promoting cycling as daily transport — even mixed with other modes — could be a practical strategy to reduce dementia risk and preserve brain structure,” Liangkai Chen, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Hygiene at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, and lead author of this study, told Medical News Today.

Chen plans on continuing to research the effects of cycling by looking at how often people cycle and for how long and to see what happens if people change their active travel behavior over time. This is especially true for seniors where a lifestyle change can reap real brain health benefits.

“An ounce of prevention is often worth more than a pound of treatment and we are still looking for any proven modification in middle age life which can decrease our risks of getting dementia or memory loss as we age,” Clifford Segil, DO, an adult neurologist in private practice in Santa Monica, CA said “Nothing has been proven to be clearly neuroprotective and we are still looking
for lifestyle modifications which improve our brain health as we age.”