Condicionamento físico e desempenho em testes neuropsicológicos em adultos jovens

Abstract

Brazil is a country in demographic transition period and significantly increased population over 65 years, which requires changes in public policies for health. The early onset of specific care to young adult population with a view to successful aging may represent future reduction of public and lower incidence of diseases associated with aging expenses such as dementias. To provide grants to health policies based on evidence, this study investigated the effects of physical fitness on performance in automated neuropsychological tests selected for measurement of learning functions, visuospatial memory and language. We evaluated 109 healthy young adults of both sexes, submitted to an interview; global cognitive assessment using the Mini Mental State Examination, language tests (including verbal fluency and word list of CERAD drums) and automated neuropsychological tests (Cantab Battery); assessment of physical fitness (indirect assessment of cardiorespiratory fitness, strength of lower limbs, agility assessment, measurement surround and anthropometric indices). Based on multivariate statistics by cluster analysis (Ward method, Euclidean distance) three groups divided volunteers, matched for age and education, to make up the ANOVA criterion or the Kruskal-Wallis, in the event of samples with unequal variances. In addition, the correlation analysis was performed, principal components and discriminant analysis, which showed that the cardiorespiratory fitness was the variable that most contributed to the formation of clusters. The level of significance was set at p ≤ 0.05 values. Significant differences were found in the semantic verbal fluency tests; in physical fitness tests including resting heart rate, cardiorespiratory fitness, lower limb strength and agility assessment and neuropsychological tests of Cantab Battery (paired learning - PAL and reaction time - RTI). The correlation analysis showed only weak correlations. The results obtained in this study indicate that fitness young adult practitioners or no regular exercise cannot predict performance on neuropsychological tests. However, the fitness shown to be associated with better performance on attention tasks, visuospatial memory and learning, measured through the PAL and RTI.