Bingo! Eating out, games keep seniors moving

Researchers from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago found that the decline in people's ability to get around tended to happen more slowly to people who were more socially active.Photograph by: Peter Macdiarmid, Getty Images NEW YORK - Eating out with friends and playing bingo can help people keep moving as they age, according to a U.S. study.
Researchers from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago found that the decline in people's ability to get around tended to happen more slowly to people who were more socially active.
"Being more active in a wider array of activities looks like it might be good for you," reseacher Dr. Aron Buchman told Reuters Health.
Buchman said the loss of motor function is a major public health problem as the nation's aging population is growing and this research could help tackle this problem.
"If it turns out to be true, it's something that we can intervene with on a large scale without costing society a lot of money," he said.
Several studies have shown that being physically active helps stave off motor decline in older people, Buchman and his team noted in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
But there's growing evidence that social activities and other pursuits keep people's minds sharp and extend their lives.
To date, however, no one has looked at whether social activity might have physical benefits.
To investigate, Buchman and his colleagues looked at 906 people participating in a long-term study of aging.
At the study's outset, all were quizzed on how frequently they engaged in six different types of social activity, from going out to restaurants to playing bingo and visiting friends. They also underwent a battery of tests of motor function.
People with higher levels of social activity had better physical function, the researchers found.
A one-point lower score on the scale the researchers used to gauge social activity was equivalent to a person having the motor function of a person five years older.
Over five years of follow-up, people with lower social activity scores had a faster physical decline. People with lower levels of physical activity were also more likely to become disabled and more likely to die sooner.
While it's possible that people who were more physically able were more likely to engage in social activity, Buchman and his team analyzed the results in a number of different ways to test whether the social activity-motor function link was causal.
They controlled for a host of factors including disability, joint pain and depressive symptoms, and found the relationship remained. The link also persisted when they removed disabled people or people with Parkinson's disease from their analysis.
Research on mirror neurons, which are cells in the brain that activate when a person performs a certain movement - and also when someone watches another person do the same movement - suggests that a possible mechanism by which the social and the physical could be linked, the researcher noted.