Regular exercise could help preserve the mobility of older adults.
New research shows that daily moderate activity could keep senior citizens from becoming housebound, a University of Florida news release reported. This type of activity proved to allow these individuals to maintain their walking ability at a rate of 18 percent higher than those who did not participate in it.
"The very purpose of the study is to provide definitive evidence that physical activity can truly improve the independence of older adults," principal investigator Marco Pahor, director of the UF's Institute on Aging, said in the news release.
Besides helping older adult maintain mobility, moderate activity also helped prevent long-term mobility loss by 28 percent.
"The fact that we had an even bigger impact on persistent disability is very good," Co-principal investigator Jack Guralnik, a professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said in the news release. "It implies that a greater percentage of the adults who had physical activity intervention recovered when they did develop mobility disability."
Mobility was looked at as the ability to walk 400 meters.
"Four hundred meters is once around the track, or from the parking lot to the store, or two or three blocks around your neighborhood," Guralnik said. "It's an important distance in maintaining an independent life."
The findings could help fill in gaps in exercise research, and allow medical experts to better-prescribe exercise regimens to their patients.
"As an exercise scientist, I believe this type of research is absolutely critical to establish scientific evidence on which to make recommendations for how lifestyle can beneficially influence health status." Wendy Kohrt, professor of medicine in the division of geriatric medicine at the University of Colorado, said in the news release. "There is a general belief among the public and the scientific and medical communities that we know exercise is good for you, so why do we need to do more research in this area? However, we still do not know whether certain types or doses of exercise are better than others, particularly for specific health conditions or diseases. The LIFE trial demonstrated that a modest increase in physical activity has the potential to help older adults maintain functional independence."
