Effects Of 6-month Nordic Walking Intervention On Executive Function In Middle-aged And Elderly Women

Executive function is closely related to people’s daily life,involving a series of important psychological processes such as planning and goal-oriented behavior,and its age-related decline will seriously affect the individual’s quality of life.The current trend of aging points out that the proportion of the elderly female population will increase in the future,and middle-aged and elderly women are at higher risk of cognitive impairment than men of the same age.Executive function is one of the important indicators for evaluating cognitive impairment.In recent years,Nordic walking has attracted the attention of researchers and is loved by middle-aged and elderly people because of its simplicity,safety and cost-effective.Therefore,this study will focus on middle-aged and elderly women,and use Nordic walking as an intervention method to explore the behavioral characteristics and brain nerve activity characteristics of the impact of 6-month Nordic walking on executive functions.To provide a practical basis for helping middle-aged and elderly women to effectively improve executive function and delay their decline through scientific exercise.This study took middle-aged and elderly women as subjects to explore the effect of 6-month Nordic walking intervention on their executive function.Real-time monitoring of cognitive processing by event-related potential technology,combined with the classic Go/Nogo task,N-back task and More-odd switching task,respectively,to explore the effects of 6-month Nordic walking intervention on inhibition,refreshment and switching abilities of middle-aged and elderly women.All subjects were recruited from the central urban area of Shanghai.The middle-aged and elderly female subjects were divided into Nordic walking group and control group,and the Nordic walking group received six-month exercise intervention,while the control group did not receive exercise intervention but received guidance on lifestyle.The subjects’ executive functions were measured before and after the intervention,and the effects of exercise on their executive functions were analyzed and discussed from the aspects of behavior and EEG.The results showed that: 1)During inhibition processing(Go/nogo task),both groups showed a high behavioral accuracy,but behavioral reaction time in the Nordic walking group was approached significantly faster than that in the control group.During the conflict monitoring phase,the N2 components of the two groups were found to be significantly different only at the Cz.During the inhibitory processing phase,after received intervention,the P3 amplitude in the frontal,central and parietal regions on Nordic walking group were significantly larger than those in the control group,and the Go-P3 amplitude were significantly smaller than Nogo-P3,showing a significant Go/Nogo effect.The latency of P3 was significantly faster than that of the control group,and the latency of Go-P3 was significantly faster than that of Nogo-P3.2)During memory refresh processing(N-back task),the behavioral results of the two groups were significantly different in response time and accuracy.After receiving the exercise intervention,the subjects in the Nordic walking group had better behavioral accuracy and reaction speed than those in the control group under different task load conditions.The ERP results showed that both groups successfully induced P3 components in the Pz and Fz.After the Nordic walking group received exercise intervention,their P3 latency was significantly faster than the control group under different task load conditions.The P3 amplitude were significantly higher than those in the control group,and gradually decreased with the increase of task load.3)During attention switching processing(More-odd switching task),the behavioral results of the two groups were significantly different in response time and accuracy.After receiving the exercise intervention,the subjects in the Nordic walking group had better behavioral accuracy and reaction speed than those in the control group under different task types.At the same time,the response time of the two groups of subjects in the switching trial was longer and the accuracy was lower than that in the non-switching trial.The ERP results showed that the P3 latency in the frontal,central and parietal regions of the Nordic walking group was significantly faster than that of the control group after receiving exercise intervention.In conclusion,6-month Nordic walking can effectively improve the executive function of middle-aged and elderly women.The specific behavior is characterized by the rapid and accurate response advantage of completing behavioral tasks.This response advantage comes from the improvement of information awareness and monitoring ability,cognitive resource use ability,executive processing and response decision-making ability of frontal central parietal cortex in the process of individual cognitive processing after 6-month Nordic walking intervention.