Mental, Physical and Social Components in Leisure Activities Equally Contribute to Decrease Dementia Risk

TLDR

Leisure engagement has been shown to reduce dementia risk, yet prior studies typically categorize activities by a single component—mental, physical, or social. The study aimed to assess how mental, physical, and social components individually and jointly influence dementia risk. Researchers assigned mental, physical, and social component scores to activities, then followed 776 nondemented 75‑plus Swedes for six years to monitor incident dementia. Higher scores on mental, physical, and social components were associated with reduced dementia risk (RRs 0.71, 0.61, 0.68), with the greatest protection when two or all components were high (RR 0.53).

Abstract

There is accumulating evidence in the literature that leisure engagement has a beneficial effect on dementia. Most studies have grouped activities according to whether they were predominantly mental, physical or social. Since many activities contain more than one component, we aimed to verify the effect of all three major components on the dementia risk, as well as their combined effect.A mental, social and physical component score was estimated for each activity by the researchers and a sample of elderly persons. The correlation between the ratings of the authors and the means of the elderly subjects' ratings was 0.86. The study population consisted of 776 nondemented subjects, aged 75 years and above, living in Stockholm, Sweden, who were still nondemented after 3 years and were followed for 3 more years to detect incident dementia cases.Multi-adjusted relative risks (RRs) of dementia for subjects with higher mental, physical and social component score sums were 0.71 (95% CI: 0.49-1.03), 0.61 (95% CI: 0.42-0.87) and 0.68 (95% CI: 0.47-0.99), respectively. The most beneficial effect was present for subjects with high scores in all or in two of the components (RR of dementia = 0.53; 95% CI: 0.36-0.78).These findings suggest that a broad spectrum of activities containing more than one of the components seems to be more beneficial than to be engaged in only one type of activity.