Why Dance Is Brain Medicine for Older Adults

In 2003 the New England Journal of Medicine published a 21-year study by Dr. Joseph Verghese and colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine that tracked 469 adults over the age of 75. The research team measured how often each participant did 11 physical activities and 6 cognitive activities, including reading, crossword puzzles, swimming, golf, cycling, tennis, walking, housework, and dance. The team then followed the participants for an average of more than five years to see who developed dementia.

The results surprised the research community. Of the 11 physical activities, only one was linked to a lower risk of dementia in a statistically meaningful way: frequent social dancing. People who danced often had a 76 percent lower risk of dementia compared with people who rarely danced. Reading was associated with a 35 percent lower risk, crossword puzzles four days a week with 47 percent, and playing musical instruments with 69 percent. Walking, swimming, cycling, and golf showed no protective effect against dementia in the data, though they remain valuable for heart health and balance.

Why would dance score higher than the other activities? Dr. Verghese and follow-on researchers point to the combination of three brain demands that happen at the same time during a dance class. The dancer must remember a sequence of steps, which engages memory. The dancer must read a partner or read the room and respond to a leader, a caller, or a teacher, which engages social cognition. The dancer must move the body in space with timing and balance, which engages motor planning and the cerebellum. Few activities load the brain on all three fronts at once. A 2017 follow-on study from the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Magdeburg used MRI imaging to show that 18 months of dance practice increased hippocampus volume in healthy seniors more than a matched program of walking and stretching. The hippocampus is the brain region most associated with memory and the first region damaged by Alzheimer disease.

A 2020 meta-analysis in the journal Current Alzheimer Research pooled 11 randomized controlled trials of dance interventions for older adults. The pooled finding showed a small to medium positive effect on global cognition and executive function compared with matched control groups. The effect was strongest when the dance program lasted at least six months and ran at least twice a week. Sources include the original Verghese study at nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa022252, the 2017 Magdeburg study at frontiersin.org under search term dance hippocampus Rehfeld, and the 2020 meta-analysis at benthamscience.com under Current Alzheimer Research dance interventions.