Researchers at UT Health San Antonio have found that physical activity and blood sugar control in midlife are linked to a slower rate of cognitive decline later in life - but the two factors did not carry equal weight across ethnic groups. Among 402 San Antonio residents, 52% of them Hispanic and the rest non-Hispanic white, with an average age of about 58, physical activity was tied to slower cognitive decline particularly among Hispanic participants, while lower fasting blood glucose was associated with slower decline among non-Hispanic whites.
The study, "Longitudinal association between midlife cardiovascular health and cognitive change in a bi-ethnic cohort," was published July 23 in Alzheimer's & Dementia: Behavior & Socioeconomics of Aging. Its co-senior authors are Claudia Satizabal, PhD, who leads the Population Neuroscience Core at the university's Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer's and Neurodegenerative Diseases, and Chen-Pin Wang, PhD. Satizabal framed the takeaway in public health terms: improving cardiovascular health through modifiable lifestyle changes has the potential to meaningfully reduce the burden of Alzheimer's and other dementias, especially in high-risk populations.
That framing matters because the burden is not evenly distributed. The study notes that 14% of Hispanic adults aged 65 and older have Alzheimer's, compared with 10% of non-Hispanic white older adults, and that Mexican Americans, the largest Hispanic population in the United States, carry high rates of diabetes, obesity and dyslipidemia - all of which raise dementia risk. Recent estimates attribute close to 40% of Alzheimer's cases to modifiable risk factors, and the American Heart Association's Life's Simple 7 framework, which combines diet, smoking status, physical activity, blood pressure, body mass index, cholesterol and fasting glucose, has been proposed as a route to better brain health.
Earlier work has generally linked higher Life's Simple 7 scores to better cognitive performance and lower dementia risk, but those relationships have not held uniformly across populations, and this is among the first studies to look at midlife cardiovascular factors and cognition across ethnicities. The authors point out that Hispanic populations remain underrepresented in Alzheimer's research, which limits what the field can say about risk trajectories and prevention strategies that work for everyone - a gap this bi-ethnic cohort of 402 people begins, on a modest scale, to address.