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Accelerometer-derived ‘weekend warrior’ physical activity pattern and brain health

Nature Aging volume 4, pages 1394–1402 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Extensive evidence shows the beneficial effect of adhering to a regular physical activity (PA) pattern on brain health. However, whether the ‘weekend warrior’ pattern, characterized by concentrated moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA) over 1–2 days, is associated with brain health is unclear. Here, we perform a prospective cohort study including 75,629 participants from the UK Biobank with validated accelerometry data. Individuals were classified into three PA patterns using current guideline thresholds: inactive (<150 min week−1 of MVPA), weekend warrior (≥150 min week−1 with ≥50% of total MVPA occurring within 1–2 days) and regularly active (≥150 min week−1 but not meeting weekend warrior criteria). We find that the weekend warrior pattern is associated with similarly lower risks of dementia, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, depressive disorders and anxiety compared to a regularly active pattern. Our findings highlight the weekend warrior pattern as a potential alternative in preventive intervention strategies, particularly for those unable to maintain daily activity routines.

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Fig. 1: The cumulative risk of incident brain disorders stratified by activity pattern using an activity threshold of ≥150 min of MVPA per week (guideline-based).
Fig. 2: Association between PA pattern and incident brain disorders in models with different sets of covariates and the fully adjusted model.
Fig. 3: Association between PA pattern and incident brain disorders using different thresholds of total MVPA volume per week.
Fig. 4: Association between PA pattern and incident brain disorders stratified by age and sex.

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Data availability

The main data used in this study were accessed from the publicly available UK Biobank Resource (https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk) under application no. 79095, which cannot be shared with other investigators because of data privacy laws. The UK Biobank data can be accessed by researchers on the application. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

Scripts used to perform the analyses are available at https://github.com/Chen-jie-Xu/UKB_weekend_warrior_brain_health.git.

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Acknowledgements

This study was conducted using the UK Biobank resource (application no. 79095). We want to express our sincere thanks to the participants of the UK Biobank and the members of the survey, development and management teams of this project. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 72204071 to C.X. and no. 72342017 to Y.W.); Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. LY23G030005 to C.X.); Major Science and Technology Project of Public Health in Tianjin (grant no. 21ZXGWSY00090 to Y.W.); and Scientific Research Foundation for Scholars of HZNU (grant no. 4265C50221204119 to C.X.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. The person icons in the left panel of Supplementary Fig. 1 were designed by Chagu from Iconfont (https://www.iconfont.cn). The icons for dementia and depressive disorder in Supplementary Fig. 1 were created by Ziyuejunkui and Lisefei from Iconfont. The PD icon in Supplementary Fig. 1 was designed by Freepik from Flaticon (https://www.flaticon.com). We sincerely thank the designers at Iconfont and Flaticon.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Jiahao Min, Zhi Cao.

  2. These authors jointly supervised this work: Yaogang Wang, Chenjie Xu.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Health, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China

    Jiahao Min, Tingshan Duan & Chenjie Xu

  2. School of Public Health, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, China

    Zhi Cao

  3. School of Public Health, Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China

    Yaogang Wang

  4. School of Integrative Medicine, Public Health Science and Engineering College, Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Tianjin, China

    Yaogang Wang

  5. National Institute of Health Data Science at Peking University, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Yaogang Wang

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Contributions

J.M., Z.C., Y.W. and C.X. contributed to the conception, study design and ideas. J.M. and Z.C. collected, assembled the data and performed the statistical analysis. J.M., Z.C., T.D, Y.W. and C.X. conducted results interpretation. J.M. and Z.C. wrote the first and successive drafts of the manuscript. T.D, Y.W. and C.X. revised the manuscript for important intellectual content. C.X. and Y.W. obtained fundings. C.X. and Y.W. provided administrative, technical and logistic support. All authors reviewed the manuscript and approved the final version.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Yaogang Wang or Chenjie Xu.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Aging thanks Kaarin Anstey and Severine Sabia for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Min, J., Cao, Z., Duan, T. et al. Accelerometer-derived ‘weekend warrior’ physical activity pattern and brain health. Nat Aging 4, 1394–1402 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-024-00688-y

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