Abstract
The decline in cognitive and motor functions with age affects the performance of the aging healthy population in many daily life activities. Physical activity appears to mitigate this decline or even improve motor and cognitive abilities in older adults. The current systematic review will focus mainly on behavioral studies that look into the dual effects of different types of physical training (e.g., balance training, aerobic training, strength training, group sports, etc.) on cognitive and motor tasks in older adults with no known cognitive or motor disabilities or disease. Our search retrieved a total of 1095 likely relevant articles, of which 41 were considered for full-text reading and 19 were included in the review after the full-text reading. Overall, observations from the 19 included studies conclude that improvements on both motor and cognitive functions were found, mainly in interventions that adopt physical-cognitive training or combined exercise training. While this finding advocates the use of multimodal exercise training paradigms or interventions to improve cognitive-motor abilities in older adults, the sizeable inconsistency among training protocols and endpoint measures complicates the generalization of this finding.
Highlights
Changes in brain structure and function with age can give rise to a wide range of cognitive and motor declines in healthy older adults [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]; see reviews [12, 14,15,16,17]
The present systematic review aims at providing a summary of research that has been conducted over the last decade and examined the effect of different types of physical exercise training on both cognitive and motor functions
We primarily focused on executive functions such as processing, attention, inhibition which have been shown crucial for successful performance of both gross and fine motor functioning such as locomotion, balance control, reaction time, and coordination; for review see [15,16,17]
Summary
Changes in brain structure and function with age can give rise to a wide range of cognitive and motor declines in healthy older adults [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]; see reviews [12, 14,15,16,17]. The present systematic review aims at providing a summary of research that has been conducted over the last decade and examined the effect of different types of physical exercise training on both cognitive and motor functions. Regular physical exercise training has been reported to improve mood [23], relieve anxiety and depression [24], and enhance global cognitive functions such as memory [24,25,26], attention [24, 27], inhibition [27,28,29,30,31,32,33], and processing speed [22, 34]; see reviews [21, 22, 35]. This segregation is somewhat surprising, given that motor and cognitive functions share similar brain network systems, and are expected to be influenced by parallel neurodegenerative processes in aging
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