For years, scientists have known that moving our bodies can sharpen our minds. Physical activity boosts blood flow to the brain, enhances neuroplasticity and reduces chronic inflammation. These processes are believed to protect against cognitive decline, including dementia.

Yet despite decades of research, major questions have remained unresolved.

Does exercising at any age help reduce your risk of dementia? Or only when you’re young? And what if you have a higher genetic risk – can exercising still make a difference?

New research from the long-running Framingham Heart Study in the United States, published today, offers some of the clearest answers to date. Their findings support what many clinicians already tell patients: exercise helps.

But the study also offers new insight into the potentially protective effect of staying active at the age of 45 and over – even for those with a certain genetic predisposition to dementia.

What did the study examine?

The new research draws on data from 4,290 participants enrolled in the Framingham Heart Study Offspring cohort. This study began in 1948, when researchers recruited more than 5,000 adults aged 30 and over from the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, to investigate long-term risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

In 1971, a second generation (more than 5,000 adult children of the original cohort, and their spouses) were enrolled, forming the Offspring cohort. This generation then had regular health and medical assessments every four to eight years.

In the new study, participants self-reported their physical activity. This included incidental activity such as climbing stairs as well as vigorous exercise.

Participants first reported these activities in 1971, and then again over several decades. Based on the age at which each participant was first evaluated, they were grouped into three categories:

• young adulthood (26–44 years): assessed in the late 1970s

• midlife (45–64 years): assessed during the late 1980s and 1990s

• older adulthood (65 years and over): assessed in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

To examine how physical activity influences dementia risk, the researchers looked at how many people developed dementia in each age group and at what age they were diagnosed.

Then they considered physical activity patterns within age groups (low, moderate, high) to see if there was any link between how much exercise people did and whether they developed dementia.

They also looked at who had a known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, the APOE ε4 allele.

What did they find?

Over the follow-up period, 13.2% (567) of the 4,290 participants developed dementia, mostly in the older age group.

This is quite high compared with other long-term longitudinal dementia studies and with Australian rates (one in 12 or 8.3% Australians over 65 currently have dementia).

When researchers examined physical activity levels, the pattern was striking. Those with the highest levels of activity in midlife and later life were 41–45% less likely to develop dementia than those who had the lowest levels of activity.

This was the case even after adjusting for demographic factors that increase dementia risk (such as age and education) and other chronic health factors (such as high blood pressure and diabetes).

Interestingly, being physically active during early adulthood did not influence dementia risk.

A key innovation of this study was its examination of the genetic risk factor, the APOE ε4 allele. This analysis suggests something new:

• in midlife, higher physical activity lowered dementia risk only in people who didn’t carry this genetic predisposition

• but in later life, higher physical activity lowered dementia risk in both carriers and non-carriers.

This means for people genetically predisposed to dementia, staying active later in life may still offer meaningful protection.

How significant are these results?

The findings largely reinforce what scientists already know: exercise is good for the brain.

What sets this study apart is its large sample, multi-decade follow-up, and its genetic analysis across different life periods.

The suggestion that midlife activity benefits some individuals differently depending on their genetic risk, while late-life activity benefits nearly everyone, may also add a new layer to public health messaging.

But there were some limitations

Physical activity was largely self-reported in this study, so there is a possibility of recall bias. We also do not know what type of exercise brings the best benefits.

Dementia cases in the youngest age group were rather rare too, so the small sample limits how definitively we can make conclusions about early adulthood.

The cohort is also predominantly of European ancestry and share environmental factors as they come from the same town, so this limits how much we can generalise the findings to more diverse populations.

This is particularly important given global inequities in dementia risk and diagnosis. Knowledge about dementia and risk factors also remains low in ethnically diverse groups, where it is often still seen as a “normal” part of ageing.

What does this mean for us?

The takeaway is refreshingly simple though: move more, at any age. At this stage we know there are more benefits than harm.

Joyce Siette, Associate Professor | Deputy Director, The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Life expectancy in New Zealand has increased dramatically over the past five decades. In 1970, men lived on average to 68. Today, it’s over 80.

These gains reflect major advances in public health and medical technology. But living longer can mean more years with multiple chronic conditions and disabilities, because age is a significant risk factor for most disease.

This demographic shift will reshape healthcare. Future health professionals will need to be aware of the increasingly complex social, technological and ethical challenges of caring for older people.

Ageism, or discrimination based on a person’s age, should be considered as one of these challenges.

Age influences how health concerns are interpreted. In a recent World Health Organization report, nearly 60% of health professionals admitted to making age-based (or ageist) assumptions about their patients’ abilities or needs.

Genuine symptoms are dismissed as part of normal ageing, leading to flawed decisions. There is evidence that older people are also under-treated, raising the risk of disease progression.

Other consequences include missed diagnoses. Inequalities occur where there is limited access to services or inclusion criteria are set to exclude people over 65.

There is the potential for this kind of thinking to creep into health professional education. It shows up in stereotypes that appear in case studies for learning, or in the way programmes are structured and in the kinds of clinical placements that are used.

Why ageism matters in healthcare

Our national nursing programme review in the polytechnic sector looked at New Zealand student nurses’ experiences.

It shows case studies often favoured information about older people with dementia, falls or end of life care. They rarely reflected active ageing or older adults’ resilience and agency.

Health professionals may adopt ageist attitudes from the rest of society. Student nurses begin their training programmes having been subject to both societal and cultural narratives about the role and importance of older people.

Nurse education programmes often communicated underlying beliefs about the complexity of care. Placements in aged residential care were typically scheduled in the first year of nursing, implying the work was basic if new students could do it.

Almost all nursing students were allocated to an aged-care facility where the frailest 7% of older people live. This reinforces a narrative that older adults are a homogeneous population of dependent, vulnerable people.

It misses the opportunity to teach health promotion for people who are older but remain active and independent.

What students saw

Students’ reflections highlighted the realities of aged residential care and the impact of their perceptions. One participant said:

While on placement, I saw how conveyor belt life was for the residents. It broke my heart. Residents had lost their individual identities and all fun was gone. The nurses and healthcare assistant staff were all so busy and didn’t have much time to interact on personal levels with each resident.

Others noted systemic issues:

People [nurses and carers] in aged residential care do not get paid what they are worth. This severely needs to be changed. They work so hard to not get appreciated as much as they deserve. [They are] constantly understaffed making the workload insurmountable and overwhelming.

Some worried about career stigma:

Being a new graduate and working in aged care would make me unemployable in other areas of nursing.

These comments illustrate how education and system design shape the attitudes of the future nursing workforce towards ageing and aged care. They also highlight the crucial role clinical placements have in shaping future career choices.

Tackling ageism starts in education

The programme review and student comments demonstrate how ageism influences learning, from case studies portraying older people as less capable to placements that equate ageing with frailty and funding systems that appear to devalue older people.

Addressing these issues starts with obvious steps, such as more appropriate design of learning materials and using placements that reflect a spectrum of health needs in later life.

For students who have little experience of older people, fostering inter-generational connection and building empathy can be a powerful tool to reduce ageist stereotypes.

But there is one more area to which we should be alert: ageism is in fact an emerging social determinant of health in later life.

There is a high risk that ageism will compound existing health inequities as Māori, Pacific people and rainbow communities grow older

Preparing the future healthcare workforce means recognising the diverse realities of ageing in contemporary New Zealand. If we want healthcare to meet the needs of an ageing population, education must reflect this complexity.

Tackling ageism in healthcare professional education is a critical first step.

Samantha Heath, Senior Lecturer in Nursing , University of Waikato

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

WeChat is best known as China’s all-purpose “super-app”. It is used for everything from messaging and mobile payments to shopping and government services.

As of June 2024, WeChat reported a staggering 1.37 billion active monthly users globally. For many Chinese-speaking diaspora communities – such as in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom – the app is a lifeline to their homeland and communities.

But my new research, published this week in Policy & Internet, shows WeChat has also become a powerful – and largely overlooked – component of China’s policing and public security infrastructure.

In fact, the app is now functioning as a “police app”. It’s a kind a digital toolkit allowing police to collect intelligence, accept crime reports, verify identities and access citizen data through a private platform that is deeply embedded in everyday life.

From a social platform to a policing tool

Public security bureaus in China began creating official WeChat accounts in 2012.

By 2017, more than 50,000 police accounts existed. Many offered far more than simple announcements.

Across provinces in China, police are now using WeChat to:

• operate “internet police stations” where citizens report crimes and disturbances
• collect digital tips, images and clues from users
• run real-time emergency “WeChat alarms”
• verify identities using national ID data
• link WeChat inputs to provincial “police clouds” and population surveillance databases.

In some jurisdictions, WeChat has even become a frontline policing tool.

In Guangzhou city, for example, railway police built a WeChat-based alarm system allowing citizens to send incident details directly to police dispatch. This would then trigger real-time audio and video communication.

In Zhejiang province, officers used WeChat-based facial and ID card scanning to rapidly identify individuals.

In several towns, thousands of “WeChat police groups” were created, pairing residents with local officers and blurring the line between neighbourhood governance and digital surveillance.

These functions go far beyond convenience. They show how a commercial platform has become an extension of the state’s security apparatus.

A patchwork of purposes

My research draws on 53 government procurement documents and additional Chinese-language media reports on two WeChat accounts known as “public security WeChat” and “WeChat policing”. Procurement documents are a great source of data. They are common in research in contexts where information is curated or suppressed.

The research shows how police agencies across China are integrating WeChat directly into their daily operations.

Wealthier provinces such as Fujian and Shanghai invested heavily in integrating WeChat with existing public security systems, enabling hundreds of services through the app.

Fujian province alone aimed to link WeChat with services across ten cities and more than 300 functions.

Other localities treated WeChat as a superficial PR tool. Some accounts offered little more than positive police stories or traffic announcements. Others became “zombie accounts” – created to meet digitisation targets but never properly maintained.

This patchwork reflects broader challenges in China’s digital modernisation. Local agencies face unequal resources, tight performance quotas and limited technical capacity.

For some, deep integration is possible. For others, the use of WeChat is merely symbolic compliance with government modernisation quotas.

Filling a gap for the state

The Chinese government has spent a decade pushing public security agencies to deliver more services online. Yet many local police units lack the expertise or funds to build bespoke digital systems.

WeChat offers a shortcut.

Because it already handles identity verification, payments, location data and messaging for more than a billion users, it can serve as a ready-made platform for police.

Tencent, WeChat’s parent company, has positioned itself strategically. It offers customised WeChat modules to public security departments as a commercial service

The result is a public-private security infrastructure: state needs and corporate incentives moving in the same direction.

Around the world, governments are increasingly partnering with private tech companies for policing and security.

In the United States and Europe, for example, Palantir and similar firms provide predictive policing and data-analysis platforms.

China’s version is different because WeChat is both a consumer platform and a part of the state’s digital infrastructure.

When policing functions are embedded inside an app billions of people rely on for daily life, the boundary between public service and surveillance becomes blurred.

A new future of platform power and state surveillance

For citizens, WeChat-based policing can make bureaucratic processes faster and more convenient.

But it also means everyday digital activities such as sending messages or paying bills and reporting disturbances could feed into a security architecture operated jointly by the state and a private company.

For WeChat, being compliant with the demands of the state will likely be a crucial business survival strategy.

For example, following China’s national crackdown on Tencent and the broader tech sector between 2020 and 2022, Tencent’s founder promised:

Tencent will continue to resonate with the needs of the nation and the times.

As China continues to centralise its digital governance, WeChat’s role in public security is likely to deepen – representing a new future of platform power and state surveillance.

Ausma Bernot, Lecturer in Technology and Crime, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.