Association between exercise habit changes and incident dementia after ischemic stroke

We aimed to investigate the effects of exercise habit changes on the risk of incident dementia after ischemic stroke using the Korean National Health Insurance Services Database. This study included 223,426 patients with a new diagnosis of ischemic stroke between 2010 and 2016 who underwent two serial ambulatory health checkups. The participants were divided into four categories according to their habit change or regular exercise: persistent non-exercisers, new exercisers, exercise dropouts, and exercise maintainers. The primary outcome was new diagnosis of dementia. Multivariate Cox proportional models were used to assess the effects of changes in exercise habits on the risk of incident dementia. After a median of 4.02 years of follow-up, 22,554 (10.09%) dementia cases were observed. After adjusting for covariates, exercise dropouts, new exercisers, and exercise maintainers were significantly associated with a lower risk of incident dementia than persistent non-exercisers (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR] 0.937; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.905–0.970, aHR 0.876; 95% CI 0.843–0.909, aHR 0.705; 95% CI 0.677–0.734, respectively). The impact of changes in exercise habit was more prominent in the 40–65 years age group. An energy expenditure ≥ 1000 metabolic equivalents of task-min/wk post-stroke, regardless of pre-stroke physical activity status, was mostly associated with a lower risk of each outcome. In this retrospective cohort study, initiating or continuing moderate-to-vigorous exercise after ischemic stroke was associated with a lower risk of dementia development. Further, pre-stroke regular physical activity also reduced the risk of incident dementia. The promotion of exercise in ambulatory stroke patients may reduce their future risk of incident dementia.