During aging, sensorimotor, cognitive and physical performance decline, but can improve by training and exercise indicating that age-related changes are treatable. Dancing is increasingly used as an intervention because it combines many diverse features making it a promising neuroplasticity-inducing tool. We here investigated the effects of a 6-month dance class (1 h/week) on a group of healthy elderly individuals compared to a matched control group (CG). We performed a broad assessment covering cognition, intelligence, attention, reaction time, motor, tactile, and postural performance, as well as subjective well-being and cardio-respiratory performance. After 6 months, in the CG no changes, or further degradation of performance was found. In the dance group, beneficial effects were found for dance-related parameters such as posture and reaction times, but also for cognitive, tactile, motor performance, and subjective well-being. These effects developed without alterations in the cardio-respiratory performance. Correlation of baseline performance with the improvement following intervention revealed that those individuals, who benefitted most from the intervention, were those who showed the lowest performance prior to the intervention. Our findings corroborate previous observations that dancing evokes widespread positive effects. The pre-post design used in the present study implies that the efficacy of dance is most likely not based on a selection bias of particularly gifted individuals. The lack of changes of cardio-respiratory fitness indicates that even moderate levels of physical activity can in combination with rich sensorimotor, cognitive, social, and emotional challenges act to ameliorate a wide spectrum of age-related decline.

Aging is associated with a progressive decline of mental and physical abilities. Considering the current demographic changes in many civilizations there is an urgent need for measures permitting an independent lifestyle into old age. The critical role of physical exercise in mediating and maintaining physical and mental fitness is well-acknowledged. Dance, in addition to physical activity, combines emotions, social interaction, sensory stimulation, motor coordination and music, thereby creating enriched environmental conditions for human individuals. Here we demonstrate the impact of multi-year (average 16.5 years) amateur dancing (AD) in a group of elderly subjects (aged 65–84 years) as compared to education-, gender- and aged-matched controls (CG) having no record of dancing or sporting activities. Besides posture and balance parameters, we tested reaction times, motor behavior, tactile and cognitive performance. In each of the different domains investigated, the AD group had a superior performance as compared to the non-dancer CG group. Analysis of individual performance revealed that the best participants of the AD group were not better than individuals of the CG group. Instead, the AD group lacked individuals showing poor performance, which was frequently observed for the CG group. This observation implies that maintaining a regular schedule of dancing into old age can preserve cognitive, motor and perceptual abilities and prevent them from degradation. We conclude that the far-reaching beneficial effects found in the AD group make dance, beyond its ability to facilitate balance and posture, a prime candidate for the preservation of everyday life competence of elderly individuals.

Because the preservation of sufficient tactile acuity into advanced age is an important prerequisite for the maintenance of autonomous living, we believe that the concept of coactivation might turn out to be beneficial in preserving everyday sensorimotor competence in the elderly through new forms of therapeutic interventions.

Sensorimotor functions decrease in old age. The well-documented loss of tactile acuity in elderly is accompanied by deterioration of haptic performance and fi ne manipulative movements. Physical training and exercise can maintain sensorimotor fi tness into high age. However, regular schedules of training require discipline and physical fi tness. We here present an alternative interventional paradigm to enhance tactile, haptic, and fi ne motor performance based on passive, sensory stimulation by means of tactile coactivation. This approach is based on patterned, synchronous tactile stimulation applied to the fi ngertips for 3 hours. The stimulation drives plastic reorganizational changes in somatosensory cortex that affect perception and behavior: We demonstrate that following 3 hours of coactivation tactile acuity as well as haptic object exploration and fi ne motor performance are improved for at least 96 hours. Because this kind of intervention does not require active participation or attention of the subjects, we anticipate that coactivation is a prime candidate for future therapeutic interventions in patients with impaired sensorimotor abilities. It can be assumed that the maintenance and restoration of sensorimotor functions can ensure and preserve independence of daily living. Further optimizing of the stimulation protocol can be assumed to strengthen both the range and durability of its effi cacy.

Background: Long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD) play important roles in mediating activity-dependent changes in synaptic transmission and are believed to be crucial mechanisms underlying learning and cortical plasticity. In human subjects, however, the lack of adequate input stimuli for the induction of LTP and LTD makes it difficult to study directly the impact of such protocols on behavior.

Aging affects all levels of neural processing, including changes of intracortical inhibition and cortical excitability. Paired-pulse stimulation, the application of two stimuli in close succession, is a useful tool to investigate cortical excitability in humans. The paired-pulse behavior is characterized by the second response being significantly suppressed at short stimulus onset asynchronies. While in rat somatosensory cortex, intracortical inhibition has been demonstrated to decline with increasing age, data from human motor cortex of elderly subjects are controversial and there are no data for the human somatosensory cortex (SI). Moreover, behavioral implications of age-related changes of cortical excitability remain elusive. We therefore assessed SI excitability by combining paired-pulse median nerve stimulation with recording somatosensory evoked potentials in 138 healthy subjects aged 17-86 years. We found that paired-pulse suppression was characterized by substantial interindividual variability, but declined significantly with age, confirming reduced intracortical inhibition in elderly subjects. To link the age-related increase of cortical excitability to perceptual changes, we measured tactile two-point discrimination in a subsample of 26 aged participants who showed either low or high paired-pulse suppression. We found that tactile performance was particularly impaired in subjects showing markedly enhanced cortical excitability. Our data demonstrate that paired-pulse suppression of human SI is significantly reduced in older adults, and that age-related enhancement of cortical excitability correlates with degradation of tactile perception. These findings indicate that cortical excitability constitutes an important mechanism that links age-related neurophysiological changes to behavioral alterations in humans.

No abstract

Human haptic performance is not fixed, but subject to major alterations through learning processes. We describe a new stimulation protocol that allows to improve haptic performance in humans in a highly systemic way through unattended activation-based learning. The so-called coactivation protocol is based upon temporal constraints of Hebbian learning where simultaneity plays a key role for the induction of plastic changes. We provide an overview about the potential of coactivation by summarizing recent findings showing that coactivation alters a broad range of basic as well as cognitively demanding types of haptic performance in parallel to cortical reorganization in somatosensory cortex. For example, coactivation applied to the tip of the index finger, or to all fingers of the dominant hand improves tactile acuity, but also haptic object recognition, and speeds up multiple-choice reaction times. Because such changes persist between 24 h and 1 week without further intervention, we interpret the underlying processes as a particular form of perceptual learning. We describe results where coactivation has been utilized for therapeutical purposes in impaired human populations, we outline new developments to optimize and extend unattended activation-based learning protocols, and we sketch the next steps necessary to apply the concept of unattended activation-based learning on a regular and reliable basis as a therapeutical tool in order to selectively interfere with impaired haptic performance.