Physical, cognitive, and social leisure activities are associated with a lower conversion to dementia. We examined whether single components of thirteen physical, five cognitive, and six social activities, or their combined effect are related to non-conversion or performance in episodic or verbal memory, executive functioning, and language.

A prospective five-year study in community dwelling cohort of 75-year-old adults (N=399) without dementia at baseline from the Vienna Transdanube Aging Study (VITA).

Using the self-reported leisure activities during the year prior to the baseline examination, later converters to dementia already had lower composite scores of leisure activities. In the adjusted analysis, hiking and summation of all physical activities predicted a lower conversion to dementia (P=0.019, OR=0.56; 95%CI: 0.34–0.91 and P=0.035, OR=0.88; 95%CI: 0.77–0.99). Cognitive activities such as reading and writing, were associated with a lower rate of conversion to dementia; in contrast, television (TV) viewing showed a trend towards increase in conversion (P=0.053, OR=1.8; 95%CI: 0.9–3.4). In multiple comparisons, physical, cognitive, and social activities lead to improvements in episodic, visual memory, executive function, and naming ability. TV viewing predicted a worse performance in executive function at five-year follow-up.

These results from a middle European population-based study support a protective effect of leisure time activities on lower conversion to dementia and identify an association between the passive activity of TV viewing and low executive functioning.