Study: Exercise Helps Aging Brains Grow Larger

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/study-exercise-helps-aging-brains-grow-larger/360291/

?n3qhxp
79-year-old Hideko Kurihara lifts wooden dumbbells during Japan's "Respect for the Aged Day" (Yuriko Nakao/Reuters)

Problem: According to the World Health Organization, more than 35 million people worldwide suffer from dementia. Though we still lack a lot of understanding about dementia—where it comes from and how to stop it—we do know that mild cognitive impairment, or MCI, is a risk factor for dementia, and scientists think it may be a stage where we can successfully intervene before it develops further. Previous research has shown that the brain benefits from aerobic exercise, and in a new study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine aims to see if exercise could be the intervention we’ve been looking for.


Methodology: Researchers from Canada and the Netherlands did a 26-week study on 86 women who were between 70 and 80 years old. The study focused only on women to avoid potential gender differences in how the brain responds to exercise. The participants were assigned to an aerobic training, resistance training, or balance and tone training regimen (this last one was the control group), and performed their respective exercises twice per week.

Before and after the 26 weeks of exercise, the researchers measured the volume of participants’ hippocampuses (the region of the brain associated with memory, and whose atrophy is associated with Alzheimer’s Disease) as well as their performance on a verbal learning test that asked them to recall words spoken aloud to them.

Results: The group that did aerobic exercise had significantly increased hippocampal volume at the end of the 26 weeks, compared with the control group. The resistance training group did not see this effect. However, the increase in hippocampal volume was associated with somewhat worse performance on the verbal learning test. The researchers called this latter finding “unexpected.”

[djean111]

1. Interesting on the verbal test results. Like to know more about that.

Will be 70 in a couple of years. I do exercise. One thing I have done for a while now is play text twist every morning, I usually quit after I get to 100,000 points, yesterday I got to 702,000 and quit because I was bored. I really think this does exercise parts of my brain, and I am assured by my family that I am still as sarcastic, er, well-spoken and quick-witted, as ever.