Key to Alzheimer's may be exercise

It works for mice with Alzheimer's. But will it work for people?

That's what researchers at LDS Hospital will try to sort out with a new study testing whether regular exercise can help slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease. The study is looking for patients between the ages of 65 and 89 who have been diagnosed with memory loss consistent with mild-stage Alzheimer's.

Clinical neuropsychologist Dr. Kelly Davis Garrett, one of the study's principal investigators, will join Nick Zullo from the Utah Chapter of the Alzheimer's Association for the Deseret Morning News/Intermountain Healthcare Health Hotline on Saturday. They will answer phoned-in questions about Alzheimer's disease from 10 a.m. to noon.

Research on laboratory mice genetically programmed to get the disease have shown that exercise — in the mice's case, running on a wheel — can help them learn mazes faster than more sedentary mice. Autopsies revealed they also had less Alzheimer's pathology.

The LDS Hospital study — the Brain Builders Program — will last six months and will include a control group and a group that will engage in monitored exercise three times a week. That might mean chair aerobics or a treadmill, plus weight training, depending on the person's abilities and preferences.

"We're hoping exercise modifies the trajectory of the decline, and maybe even stabilizes it," says Garrett. The research to date has been hopeful but not at all definitive, and the Brain Builder site at intermountainhealthcare.org makes it clear that "there may not be any benefit of an exercise program to treat memory loss."

Study participants will be tested before and after for a variety of cognitive functions, including memory, the ability to learn new information, problem solving, abstraction and "executive functions" such as organization and planning skills.

The investigators are looking for otherwise healthy people who have had a loss of both memory and one other cognitive function. "It's more than just 'My memory isn't as good as it used to be' and more like 'I'm having a hard time balancing my checkbook now and I used to be an accountant'," Garrett explains.

Because the study participants will have the type of dementia associated with mild-stage Alzheimer's, she says, their ability to remember their pasts will still be intact but they'll have trouble forming new memories. That's because Alzheimer pathology starts in the hippocampus part of the brain, where memories are catalogued.