Engagement in social, physical, and cognitive activities is beneficial for maintaining cognitive health in later life by providing cognitive reserves against cognitive and neurodegenerative decline.

Insight is needed to understand how different activities combine to provide cognitive protection before and after the beginning of decline.

The current work used a cross-sectional data set of older adults who were cognitively unimpaired (CU), live with subjective cognitive impairment (SCI), live with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), or live with Alzheimer’s disease. Beneficial behaviors included easily modifiable risk factors for dementia in late life: engagement in social, creative, and physical activities. The study explored individual and combined effects on the relationships between hippocampal volume and memory.

Greater engagement in beneficial behaviors minimized the neural–cognitive relationship in the SCI group. Once disease progression continued to MCI, risk factors no longer modified the brain-cognition relationship.

Understanding how individual behaviors combine provides guidance when developing intervention trials or public policy procedures.