Exercise acts like a real medicine, counteracts muscle loss, reduces cardiovascular risks and improves cognitive abilities. Better if you start young. To avoid problems, just adapt it to the needs of the individual person
L’physical exercise? a medicine for everyone, but especially for Senior citizens: underlined Mikel Izquierdo, director of the Department of Public Health of the University of Navarra in Spain, during the Healthy Aging Week 2021. The sooner you start exercising better, but never too late and even the elderly can get active . Starting with young pathologies related to lack of exercise, such as sarcopenia and the resulting fragility, are not encountered, but motion is also a real therapy that can and must be implemented precisely to reduce the limitations due to diseases that may have appeared in the third age
Extraordinary effects
Physical activity has extraordinary effects and can be considered a true multi-pill: in addition to counteracting the muscle loss and weight gain in fact reduces cardiovascular risk and improves cognitive abilities, lowering the danger of dementia, and the main road for the so-called active aging that prevents frailty, falls and therefore the loss of autonomy. We become fragile due to an involution of the organism that manifests itself with alterations in the levels of some pro-inflammatory molecules and hormones, but above all with a change in the ability to move, even easier to evaluate, intervenes Francesco Landi, president of the Italian Society of Gerontology and Geriatrics. If an elder has difficulty staying in Balance in particular conditions, for example with one foot in front of the other, if he cannot get up easily from a chair without using a support, if the pace slows down to less than one meter per second, in two out of three cases he will lose autonomy within the following four years. In particular, walking well is an essential factor in understanding the degree of vulnerability because an action that depends very much on general neuromuscular health: it is not possible to do so when motor coordination worsens, as happens in conjunction with cognitive decline; this is not possible when there is a generalized low-grade inflammation, very harmful to the organs, as in the case of sarcopenic obesity in which the muscles are infiltrated with fat and no longer functional as before.
Beyond genetics
The good news is that the moment you become fragile not written in the genes, it can be removed over time thanks to constant movement: Exercise should not be understood as fitness in the strict sense but as a daily aerobic activity adapted to one’s own conditions: in other words, it does not mean running a marathon but using less the elevator, walk more. Every day, says Landi. The ideal would be one walk quite long daily: times and distances must be tailored to each individual, but the important thing is not to stop because those who stop (literally) are lost. However, even when autonomy is lost, there is room to intervene: this is demonstrated by the experiences conducted by the geriatrician Marco Inzitari, medical director of the Parc Sanitari Pere Virgili in Barcelona, who literally brought rehabilitation home to patients discharged from the hospital. We have thus reduced costs while guaranteeing excellent results for the elderly, because adapting physical exercise and rehabilitation in general, including indications for sleep hygiene and nutrition, to the context and real environment of each a really more effective prevention because it is personalized. And physical activity turned out to be a kind of “magic pill” to reduce disability, even in the most fragile patients or in those with cognitive deficits.
true even in those hospitalized, as Izquierdo adds: 15-30 minutes of adapted exercises every day, from getting up and sitting independently from the chair to walking with a walker, are enough to improve the physical functionality and independence of the elderly once discharged : it means, for example, being able to go to the bathroom alone when you return home, a goal that is small only in appearance because it counts so much for the elderly and for those who take care of them. Physical exercise is always safe and effective, just adapt it to everyone: it can prevent diseases, be a complementary therapy, replace treatments that could prove risky for an elderly person and it can also be the only possibility of intervention for conditions for which there are no therapies such as frailty, sarcopenia, cognitive deficits, concludes Izquierdo.
February 19, 2022 (change February 19, 2022 | 19:01)
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