58 | HealthLinksSC.com • Improvement of heart and lungs. • More muscular strength, endurance and motor fitness. • Weight management. • More aerobic fitness. • Improved muscle tone. • Stronger bones and reduced risk of osteoporosis. • Better coordination, agility and flexibility. • Improved balance and spatial awareness. • Increased physical confidence. • Greater self-confidence and self-esteem. • Better social skills. • Improved general and psychological well-being. • Improved mental functioning. “Dancing stimulates brain processes,” said Agnieszka Zygmont, dance therapist and doctor of physical culture with the University of Wrocław in Poland. In a 2023 online article for the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, Zygmont stated, “Evidence shows that, together with the constant repetition of dance movement, the volume of the hippocampus (a brain structure that plays a major role in learning and memory) grows. And after as few as six weeks of such training, the amount of gray matter increases.” She added that while ballroom dancing is especially good for the brain and nervous system, folk dances such as Korean and Turkish also improve the mood of senior citizens. Ways to keep as much youth as possible in seniors have been touted for years as tantamount to overcoming old age and its diseases. Consider, for instance, NIH currently estimates that 500,000 thousand to 1 million Americans are affected by Parkinson’s disease, long affiliated with seniors. The primary motor symptoms of Parkinson’s include Bradykinesia (slowed movement), stiffness of the limbs and trunk, tremors, and impaired balance and coordination. “It is these symptoms that dance may help alleviate,” said Daniel Tarsy, doctor of neurology with Harvard Medical School, in a 2015 interview. “A lot of this research is observational, not hard science, but it’s consistent and there’s a lot of it.” More recently, in 2023, BioMed Central in the United Kingdom presented findings from a series of 10 studies involving 984 participants aged 55 years and over. Researchers determined that dance therapy significantly improved global cognitive function, memory, executive function, attention, language and mental health (i.e., depression and neuropsychiatric symptoms). All of this may not be something you think about when you go dancing, but J.R. Duncan, owner of Arthur Murray Dance Studio of Charleston, said it’s now always part of his instruction.
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