Effect of Light Exercise on the Elderly with Dementia

In order to clarify the effect of light exercise on the elderly with dementia, a light exercise, to ring a bell to the rhythm of a metronome, was carried out on elderly patients with dementia who had entered a geratric hospital. The analysis was performed with objecticve indices (neurometry, blood pressure, pulse, and skin surface temperature). Comparing the effect of light exercise to that of touch, the effect by light exercise appeared in the arm and that by touch
appeared in the leg. Furthermore, blood pressure than the pulse were settled by light exercise, and a more remarkable change appeared in the blood pressure than the pulse. In addition, results of a language association test carried out on subjects gave the personality characteristic of the elderly with dementia with respect to personal relations and interests in externality, etc. Regarding relevance to objectve indices, ecven though there was a difficulty for statistical processing of language association test results, the subjects who had good results in objective indices tended to appropriately react to a
stimulus word in language association test. This indicated validity of objective indices.