Sports and Dementia

Alzheimer Europe hosts Alzheimer’s Association Academy session focusing on sports and dementia

On 18 May 2021, Alzheimer Europe held an online session of its popular Alzheimer’s Association Academy series. These Academy sessions have been running since December 2015, and have been online since the start of the COVID pandemic. The theme for this session was “Sports and Dementia”.

Ping4Alzheimer

The first speaker, Renato Walkowiak, presented Ping4Alzheimer, a joint initiative of the French Table Tennis Federation and France Alzheimer. According to some scientific studies, table tennis is one of the most suitable and recommended sports for older people, and may help to slow cognitive decline. With this in mind, Mr Walkowiak, whose grandmother passed away with Alzheimer’s dementia some years ago, began giving special sessions for people with dementia and carers at his table tennis club, and the “Ping4Alzheimer” initiative was born. The programme has been such a success that a partnership has now been created between the French Table Tennis Federation and France Alzheimer, with the aim of deploying the initiative nationally. Karine Teow of the International Table Tennis Federation and Lorène Gilly of France Alzheimer joined Mr Walkowiak for this presentation, each highlighting that their respective organisations were delighted to be involved in such a promising project. You can read more about this initiative on pages 40–41.

Partnering with the German Olympic Committee on sport and dementia

The second speaker, Sabine Jansen from the Deutsche Alzheimer Gesellschaft (DAlzG), described the partnership that has developed between her organisation and the Deutsche Olympische Sportbund (German Olympic Sports Confederation), aiming to involve as many people with dementia as possible in sports clubs throughout Germany. The programme, called “Sport bewegt Menschen mit Demenz” (sport moves people with dementia) emerged from Germany’s National Dementia Strategy, which was launched in 2019. The first of the four fields of action in the strategy is “Developing and establishing dementiainclusive communities to enable people with dementia to participate in society”, which includes sports and sports clubs. A box of materials was developed in 2020, which is available to sports clubs and Alzheimer associations, in order to motivate and support their participation in this initiative.

Football memories

The next presentation was given by Chris Kelly from Alzheimer Scotland and Richard McBrearty from the Scottish Football Museum. They described a joint project called Football Memories, which has been running for over ten years. Chris Kelly presented an off-shoot of the project, which he created: a dementia-friendly walking football league, developed to help give people living with dementia the opportunity to remain involved with football. It offers slowpaced five-a-side games, played at Scotland’s national stadium. The project, “Hampden Heroes”, also gives participants the chance to compete and win the Alzheimer Scotland Walking Football League and Glasgow Cup. Richard McBrearty introduced delegates to Scotland’s Football Archive, which represents thousands of images from Scottish football history. The website enables groups to access these digital collections for “reminiscence activities”.

Sport and dementia risk

The final talk was on “Sport and dementia risk”, given by Michael Hornberger, Professor of Applied Dementia Research at the Norwich Medical School, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. His talk was mainly focused on the link between traumatic head injury and dementia. The clinical evidence of a link between traumatic head injury and dementia has been known since the 1920s and the initial evidence was based mostly on boxers, whose post mortem brains showed similar protein changes to those with Alzheimer’s disease. These changes, named Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) have also been found in professional players of sports such as rugby, American football and ice hockey.

The key injury to avoid, he noted, is concussion and in particular repeated concussions. However, it is not only concussion that can cause neuroinflammation, but also “subconcussive” events. These may be caused, for example, by heading the ball in football. For this reason, heading the ball has been banned in children’s football, since the young brain is more prone to injury.

Prof. Hornberger also made sure to stress the importance and benefits of sports, both for general wellbeing and for dementia riskreduction, which he said can be reduced by up to 30% through regular exercise.