Ryan Mallon reports:

The study, which assessed almost 500,000 participants over a 13-year period, found that cycling was associated with a lower risk of all-cause dementia compared to driving
by Ryan Mallon
Tue, Jun 10, 2025 15:57
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Cycling regularly in midlife can help reduce the risk of dementia, as well as maintaining brain health, a new large-scale study has found.

The study, which was carried out by researchers based in China and Australia and published this week in JAMA Network Open(link is external), aimed to investigate the long-term association between how people travel and dementia risk and brain structure.

The researchers assessed data collected over a 13-year spell from 479,723 participants of UK Biobank, a long-term biomedical database containing de-identified biological samples and genetic, lifestyle, and health information.

The participants, 54 per cent of whom were women, with an average baseline age of 56.5, were all dementia-free at the beginning of the study and able to walk.

They were asked what modes of transport they had used most often to get about in the previous four weeks, excluding their commute to and from work. These responses were then grouped into four categories: non-active (car or public transport), walking, mixed-walking (a combination of non-active transport and walking), and cycling and mixed-cycling (cycling combined with other modes).

Nearly half of the participants (49.1 per cent) were inactive; while 6.8 per cent were classified as walking-only, 37 per cent as mixed-walking, and seven per cent as cycling and mixed-cycling.

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Over the following 13 years, 8,845 cases of dementia and 3,956 cases of Alzheimer’s disease were recorded among the participants, identified by the researchers through hospital records and death registers.

According to the study’s categorisation, travel that incorporated cycling was associated with a lower adjusted risk of young-onset dementia, late on-set dementia, and Alzheimer’s, compared to non-active transport.

Cycling, either on its own or combined with other forms of transport, was also found to have a significant connection with higher hippocampal volumes, the researchers concluding that riding a bike represents “a promising approach for maintaining brain health”.

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