There are a variety of causes that lead to neurodegenerative problems such as genetics, congenital abnormalities, infections, lifestyle, injuries, and environmental health. In many cases neurodegenerative disease doesn't come from a single cause and there are multiple factors that contribute to the disease. While you can’t control some factors such as genetics, since they are largely affected by family history and random mutations, you can control your environment and lifestyle which largely attributes to a lesser chance of developing a neurodegenerative disease. Life habits such as how much sleep you get, what kind of food you eat, and alcohol and tobacco intake has a large effect on your cognitive health and how it will progress in the future.

A study done by Wendy Suzuki, a professor of Neural Science at NYU, proves the benefits of exercise by reviewing both human and animal models that study a wide array of neurochemical changes after a single session of exercise. By reviewing multiple scientific works their study concluded that repeated short duration exercise engages feedback in the plasticity based brain mechanisms. Also, exercise enhances neurogenesis and brain plasticity because the prefrontal cortex is the area that undergoes most improvements and is key to memory processing.This concludes that acute exercise can be used as a therapeutic tool to treat cognitive decline in aging individuals.

For conditions such as Parkinson’s researchers found that exercise has short term benefits of postural stability, mobility and improved quality of life. However, long term strenuous activities can be challenging over a long period of time. However dance is an acute exercise that does not take a lot of time or effort. Dance can be highly social and engaging physical activity. It has the potential to increase body awareness, wellbeing and movement control through the use of cueing, cognitive strategies, creativity and music. Besides improving the condition of Parkinson's, dance was proven to benefit overall memory. Significant changes were seen in global cognition, memory, balance, and it significantly decreased depression.