Rhythm Experience and Africana Culture Trial

REACT is a randomized intervention to examine the benefits of African Dance as a method to increase physical activity behaviors in older adults. In this 6- month intervention, older African Americans will be randomly assigned to either an African Dance or an Africana Culture class. Both before and at the completion of the intervention, the investigators will collect a comprehensive neuropsychological battery and MRI scans of brain health and function to better study how physical activity influences neurocognitive health in African Americans.

Aim 1: Examine whether the African Dance intervention improves cognitive performance compared to an educational control group. H1: The dance group will show cognitive improvements in a domain-specific fashion such that executive and memory functions will be enhanced more than other cognitive domains; Aim 2. Examine whether African Dance influences brain morphology, task-evoked neural responses, cerebral blood flow, and resting state connectivity. H1: It is predicted that African Dance will increase volume, white matter integrity, perfusion, and functional activation/connectivity in a regionally-specific fashion such that prefrontal and hippocampal areas will be more sensitive to the intervention than other brain regions. Aim 3. Explore potential physiological and socio-emotional mechanisms of the dance intervention. The investigators will collect measures of physical and psychosocial health such as waist circumference, blood pressure, blood glucose and lipid levels, mood, anxiety, depression, and loneliness and examine whether intervention-related changes to these measures mediate improvements in cognitive performance.