Acute Exercise Facilitates Semantically Cued Memory in Nursing Home Residents

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To study the acute effects of non-strenuous physical exercise on memory retrieval and visuo-motor performance in old-old nursing home residents. DESIGN: A randomized control trial. SETTING: A nursing home. PARTICIPANTS: Ambulatory volunteers from the nursing home, with all 20 shown to be normal on mental status. Three were male and 17 female, with a means of 84.5 years for age and 9.3 years for education. They were divided at random into an exercise and a control group. INTERVENTION: A single 15-minute standardized bout of non-strenuous exercise administered independently to each participant in the exercise group. Control group participants watched a video of similar exercises for 15 minutes. MEASUREMENTS: Two measures requiring the retrieval of category instances with semantic or initial consonant cues. Retrieval time was 60 seconds for each of four categories per measure. Visuo-motor performance was measured by Symbol Digit coding. Testing sessions were held before exercise, immediately post-exercise and 30 minutes post-exercise. RESULTS: The group-by-time interaction was significant only for semantically cued memory (P < 0.01), with higher retrieval at post-testing only in the exercised group. The higher retrieval was mainly attributable to more new items retrieved by the exercise group at the immediate post-test (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: This study provides preliminary support for the hypothesis that non-strenuous physical exercise has positive acute effects on meaningfully cued memory.