Keeping healthy dancing

A June 7 2015 NY Times article " Finding the Right Balance" by Alex Hutchinson suggests that dance is one of the best activities for older people in order to avoid falling, a common danger.
He opens by noting that fall can be serious.   Over 65, "one in three in this age group falls every year, resulting in some 250,000 hip fractures and more than 25,000 deaths, usually from traumatic brain injuries."
"For an older adult who wants to continue living independently, it’s clear that the ability to rise from a chair and walk across the room, which requires the coordination of muscle strength, balance and aerobic activity, is more important than any individual element of fitness. And it’s not just a physical challenge. One key warning that you’re at higher risk of falling is if you tend to stop walking when you talk — a sign that the cognitive demands of staying on your feet are overloading your brain.
An emerging body of research suggests that exercising in a way that taxes your coordination, agility and balance — a suite of abilities known as “gross motor skills” — rewires your brain in ways that are fundamentally different from straightforward aerobic activity or strength training. By improving these physical attributes, you also enhance cognitive performance.
"...Cognitive gains occur in different ways depending on the mode of exercise. While aerobic exercise and strength training trigger brain chemicals that enhance neuron growth and survival, balance and coordination call on higher-level cognitive processes that seem to increase the number of synapses connecting the neurons.
"That, in turn, suggests another reason simple balance exercises alone won’t achieve what we want. It is novelty and unpredictability, rather than repetition, that are essential to keep your brain engaged. "A recent study by researchers in Denmark, Finland and Germany compared a group of 15 endurance-trained athletes, like runners and cross-country skiers, with a group of skill-trained dancers, gymnasts and figure skaters. The researchers captured data to assess their subjects’ “motor cortex plasticity,” a measure of the brain’s ability to change its wiring in response to new stimuli.
"Both types of athletes have highly trained calf muscles, but endurance athletes use them repetitiously, in a way that the brain consigns to autopilot. Sure enough, plasticity in the area of the brain that controls calf muscles was no different between endurance athletes and nonathletes. In contrast, the dancers, gymnasts and skaters, for whom autopilot is not an option, showed dramatically higher plasticity: Their neurons were primed to keep learning new motor tasks.
"A striking feature of the balance and coordination exercises used in these cognitive studies is that they sound a lot like games. Whether you’re dancing or playing tennis, the unpredictability of your partner’s actions means that no two workouts are the same. Perhaps the enjoyment we get from a good game isn’t just a nice bonus: It’s an indicator that we’re fully engaged, mind and body, in the activity. You could call that achieving good balance."