How Your Reaction Speed And Accuracy Now Predicts Frailty Later

“A healthy mind in a healthy body” is an often-said thing, and there’s clearly a two-way relationship (hard to have one without the other), and now there’s more science to back it up, on the side of “brain health in midlife predicts body health in older age”, by several important measures:

Quick brain now, strong body later

Researchers (Dr. Anna Tirkkonen et al.) examined whether cognitive reaction time and response accuracy in late midlife predict frailty levels and progression, using 1,279 participants from the Helsinki Birth Cohort Study aged 57–70 at baseline.

A quick note on frailty: for the purposes of this study, frailty is described as an age-related, multi-system decline linked to higher risks of falls, hospitalization, and mortality.

In other words, something a bit more serious than “teehee, I am a dainty flower”, and rather a matter of life and death.

What Dr. Tirkkonen and her team found, in few words: slower reaction time was associated with higher levels of frailty in late midlife across most cognitive domains, while higher response accuracy was associated with lower frailty levels, with particularly strong associations observed in women.

Not a trivial difference, either, as each standard deviation slower reaction time was associated with a >2x higher level of frailty in late midlife.

About those sex-specific findings: better working memory response accuracy was linked to lower frailty levels in women only, while some longitudinal associations differed between men and women depending on the cognitive domain assessed (bearing in mind, the study used a 41-item frailty index), and each standard deviation higher divided attention response accuracy was associated with an equally slower annual increase in frailty among men only.

About the speed/accuracy distinction, we’ll quote Dr. Tirkkonen herself:

❝Our findings showed that slower reaction time in cognitive tasks was associated with higher levels of frailty in late midlife, among adults aged 57 to 70 years.

We also found that only response accuracy—but not reaction time—was associated with the progression of frailty.❞

In other words, the slower reaction times will predict early frailty itself, but lower accuracy scores will predict how that frailty progresses later.

You can find the paper itself here: Cognitive Performance in Late Midlife as a Predictor of Frailty from Late Midlife into Old Age: A Longitudinal Birth Cohort Study

Maybe this is the mechanism behind the science for Coffee vs Frailty!

Of course, the single biggest thing to do to avoid frailty is still resistance training, so do check out: Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)

And if you don’t love weights, then don’t worry, we have you covered: Resistance Beyond Weights

However, if you’re curious about your own reaction speed and accuracy, then here you go:

Online Reaction Tests & Women’s Cognitive Health (Test Yours!) ← it’s free!

Want to learn more?

For a more comprehensive approach, you might like this book we reviewed a little while back:

Strong – by Jacqueline Hooton ← the author herself is in her 60s and very much knows her stuff 🙂

Take care!