“How fast a person moves in middle age tells how much their brain and body have aged and how fast they are aging,” says Lee Ji Hartmann Rasmussen, an aging research scientist at Duke University. – The gait speed is not only an indicator of the general state of the body, but also the state of its brain.
Scientists, after a huge number of tests and research, have come to three important findings.
1. Slow gait at the age of 40 is primarily due to the fact that a person has played little sports throughout his life. Then – what a paradox! – the body seems to wear out faster, fades away faster. Physical performance in the second half of life begins to fall sharply, if before that a person did not load his body with physical exercises as it should.
2. For those who prefer to move slowly and are in no hurry, structural changes in the brain and age-related destruction of internal organs begin earlier. This affects the appearance, so the face of slow people looks much older than those who prefer to move quickly.
3. A clear link was also found between IQ level and the risk of developing dementia between those who walk quickly and those who walk slowly. Spurs have better intelligence and generally high neurocognitive functioning. They not only walk fast, they also think faster. But in fairness it should be noted that scientists are already able to notice the future slowness at the age of three. That is, it is also an individual feature of each person, inherent in nature. We can influence something, but we cannot completely change our metabolic processes.