The Effects of Exercise on Cognitive Function in Older Adults With Different Types of Dementia: A Meta-Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Combating dementia is a public health priority, and exercise training is one promising strategy for dementia prevention. However, its efficacy in promoting cognitive outcomes in different types of dementia remains unknown. We conducted a systematic review (N = 27) and meta-analysis (N = 24) of randomized controlled trials with cognitive function as a primary or secondary outcome. We aimed to assess the effect of exercise interventions on the cognitive function of older adults (>60 years) diagnosed with different types of dementia. We synthesized data from 2,441 older adults with dementia. Eleven trials included older adults with multiple types of dementia, eight with Alzheimer's disease, six with unspecified types of dementia, and two with vascular cognitive impairment. We performed random-effects models using robust variance estimation (RVE) and tested potential moderators using the approximate Hotelling-Zhang test (HTZ). Results suggest a small effect of exercise on cognitive function for all-cause dementia (g = 0.18; 95% CI: 0.04, 0.33; p = 0.016); however, the effects did not differ by type of dementia. Moderation analyses showed that trials that did not specify participants' severity of dementia, applied individual-level randomization, and had higher intervention adherence demonstrated larger exercise effects on cognitive function for all-cause dementia. We conclude that exercise promotes small improvements in the cognitive function of older adults with all-cause dementia. More research including different types of dementia is needed if we hope to determine the precise effects of exercise for each type of dementia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".