A recent study has discovered an exercise “sweet spot” that reverses cognitive decline in aging mice. The research team discovered that 35 days of con-tinuous exercise improved learning and memory deficits in the aging animals.
Their findings also suggest an explanation for how and why exercise improves cognitive function. Various studiesTrusted Source show that exercise provides the body with multiple potential health benefits.
From immediate improvements, such as more efficient metabolism, to long-term gains, such as protection against cancer, the benefits are abundant.
Recently, these benefits have come to include the health of the brain — particularly the hippocampus, which is responsible for learning, emotions, and memory formation. For a long time, scientists have been unsure of how and why exercise improves brain function.
Now, a new study by researchers at the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) at the University of Queensland, Australia, has set out to explain this phenomenon. The research suggests that optimal levels of exercise lead to an increase in circulating growth hormone (GH), resulting in an improvement in cognitive functions.
GH, a protein that the pituitary gland makes, helps control growth and the use of glucose and fat in the body. “The work we conducted identifies some key mechanisms as to how and why exercise induces [cognitive] changes,” says co-lead author and re-search fellow Daniel Blackmore, Ph.D. The conclu-sions from the new research appear in two separate papers in the journal iScience — the firstTrusted Source published in October 2021 and the second-Trusted Source in November.
In this study, Dr. Blackmore and his colleagues conducted two experiments. First, they investigated whether an increase in GH levels correlated with exercise points at which aged mice showed signifi-cant cognitive improvements. Then, they looked at whether GH played a causal role in the timing and activation of the exercise-related benefits that they observed in the animals.
During the experiments, the scientists used various behavioral tests to assess the animals’ cognitive functions, noting the corre-sponding results. In addition to behavioral tests, the experimenters harvested blood samples from the animals, alongside tissue samples from the brain and the pituitary gland.
These samples allowed them to observe exercise-induced changes in the hippo-campus and to monitor changes in GH levels.
