Effects of motor and cognitive dual-task performance in depressive elderly, healthy older adults, and healthy young individuals.

Helena Moraes,Jerson Laks,Heloisa Alve,Andrea Deslandes,Heitor Silveira,Cynthia Arcoverde

doi:10.1590/s1980-57642011dn05030007

Abstract

Impairments in dual-task performance can be observed in healthy older adults when motor and cognitive assignments are applied simultaneously. According to the hypofrontality hypothesis, there may be a reduction in frontal cognitive function during exercise.ObjectiveThe aim of the present study was to compare the performance changes on cognitive tests of depressive elderly (n=10), healthy older adults (n=10), and healthy young individuals (n=10) during cycle ergometer exercise.MethodsThe groups were submitted to a working memory test, a short memory test and a semantic memory test, before and during a 20-minute cycle ergometer exercise at 80% of their age-predicted maximal heart rate.ResultsSignificant differences (p=0.04) were observed in scores on the digit backward test during exercise when young individuals were compared to healthy older adults. This result indicates that young subjects, as expected, had better performance than elderly. No significant differences were found among the groups for the digit forward subtest (p=0.40) or the vocabulary test (p=0.69).ConclusionData from this study showed that healthy older adults had impaired performance on higher cognitive tasks when these assignments were applied together with motor tasks.

Highlights

Depression in older adults is a mood disorder with multiple risk factors whose development may be associated with the environment of the elderly as well as their lifestyles.[1]
A significant difference was observed for age (p
Non-significant differences were observed for age between depressive and healthy elderly adults (p=0.80) and for BDI scores between young adults and healthy elderly (p=0.43)

Summary

Introduction

Depression in older adults is a mood disorder with multiple risk factors whose development may be associated with the environment of the elderly as well as their lifestyles.[1]. In elderly individuals, motor tasks require higher levels of control of executive processing and memory leading to a greater difficulty in executing two tasks at the same time.[8,9,10,11,12] recent studies have observed that the frontal cortex is activated while learning a new motor task, an unfamiliar exercise or an exercise at higher intensity.[7,13]

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Conclusion