The Effect of Aerobic Exercise on Cognitive Function in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus: A Meta-Analysis

Altern Ther Health Med. 2024 Feb 9:AT8783. Online ahead of print.

Abstract

Background: Diabetes, a chronic disease metabolic disorder, commonly affects people. It is well-documented that aerobic exercise significantly reduces blood glucose in diabetic conditions. This study aimed to demonstrate the role of aerobic exercise on T2DM patients and cognitive impairment.

Methods: We selected studies that published random controlled trials (RCTs) on the effects of aerobic exercise on cognitive function in patients with T2DM. However, the animal trials were we excluded in this study. We retrieved the data of random controlled trials from 8 databases based on the influences of aerobic exercise on cognitive function in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). We utilized RevMan 5.3 software to analyze the data after evaluating the literature.

Results: We selected 685 studies based on the information in the abstract and title after deleting the duplicate references. Then, we investigated the full text of 15. After full-text evaluation,we selected 10 random controlled trials to perform this comprehensive meta-analysis. We found that 10 studies derived the information of cognitive function between the test and the control groups and the cognitive function is significantly higher in the experimental group (SMD: 1.88; 95% Cl: 0.91,2.84; P < .01) than the control group. Moreover, the experimental group showed significantly higher minimum mental state examination (MMSE) (SMD: 2.06; 95% Cl: 0.96,3.14; P < .01) and Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) (SMD:1.62; 95% Cl: 0.54, 2.69; P < .01) than the normal group.

Conclusion: Our findings demonstrated that aerobic exercise is crucially potent in T2DM patients and cognitive impairment, as evidenced by total cognitive function, MMSE, and MoCA. The above results should be warranted to verify with sophisticated clinical trials. In the future, aerobic exercise is suggested to guide patients'srecovery.