Exploring cognitive and brain oxygenation changes over a 1-year period in physically active individuals with mild cognitive impairment: a longitudinal fNIRS pilot study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Aging is associated with an increased likelihood of developing dementia, but a growing body of evidence suggests that certain modifiable risk factors may help prevent or delay dementia onset. Among these, physical activity (PA) has been linked to better cognitive performance and brain functions in healthy older adults and may contribute to preventing dementia. The current pilot study investigated changes in behavioral and brain activation patterns over a 1-year period in individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and healthy controls taking part in regular PA. METHODS: Frontal cortical response during a dual-task walking paradigm was investigated at baseline, at 6 months (T6), and at 12 months (T12) by means of a portable functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) system. The dual-task paradigm included a single cognitive task (2-back), a single motor task (walking), and a dual-task condition (2-back whilst walking). RESULTS: Both groups showed progressive improvement in cognitive performance at follow-up visits compared to baseline. Gait speed remained stable throughout the duration of the study in the control group and increased at T6 for those with MCI. A significant decrease in cortical activity was observed in both groups during the cognitive component of the dual-task at follow-up visits compared to baseline, with MCI individuals showing the greatest improvement. CONCLUSIONS: The observations of this pilot study suggest that taking part in regular PA may be especially beneficial for both cognitive performance and brain functions in older adulthood and, especially, in individuals with MCI. Our findings may serve as preliminary evidence for the use of PA as a potential intervention to prevent cognitive decline in individuals at greater risk 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".