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Research has found that people who walk regularly over many years are partly protected against dementia. Use it or lose it. How often have you heard that? Usually the person handing out the advice has it to lose. And that's the question with, say, exercise, which might prevent dementia. Perhaps it's the people who'd never get the problem who are out there pounding the pavement. To wade through this cart and horse, chicken and egg (horribly mixed metaphor), you need to follow people from their healthy years and see what happens. And that's been done with over 2000 men aged between 71 and 93, looking at how much they walked. Men who walked most were younger, better educated, had less diabetes and more coronary disease - suggesting some of them took it up after a heart problem. But taking those into account, comparing men walking fewer than 400 metres per day to those doing over 3 kilometres, the people at the lower end had nearly twice the risk of developing dementia than those exercising more. And the faster they could walk, the better the protection. And women? Well, a study of nearly 19,000 women has shown that participating in regular activity like walking, over many years, also protects against declines in thinking ability.
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