Did you know dancing can impact your brain?

MedlinePlus recently published a very interesting article on dancing and the brain. I have posted the main points in this blog post. 

Dance classes may beat traditional exercise when it comes to improving older adults’ balance — and it might enhance brain areas related to memory and learning along the way.

That’s the finding of a small study that compared dance lessons against standard exercise — including brisk walking — among 52 healthy seniors.

Over a year and a half, older adults who took weekly dance classes showed gains in their balancing ability. There were no such improvements in the traditional exercise group.

Researchers also found hints that all those mambos and cha-chas had extra brain benefits.

Seniors in both groups showed growth in the hippocampus — a brain structure that’s involved in memory and learning. But the dancers showed changes in more areas of the hippocampus.

Patrick Muller, one of the researchers on the study, suggested an explanation: The “multimodal” nature of dance — its physical and mental components — might be behind the extra brain boost.

Seniors in the dance group had to continually learn and “imprint” new steps, explained Muller, a Ph.D. candidate at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Magdeburg, Germany.

“Further research is needed to clarify whether this intervention truly has the potential to reduce the risk of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s,” Muller said.

According to Marquez, it would be interesting to do the same study with older adults who already have some cognitive impairment, and see if there are similar brain changes.

For now, Muller said, the findings suggest dance might have some advantages over simpler repetitive physical activity.

But he agreed that exercise in general — plus a healthy lifestyle overall — “can help the brain stay young.”

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