Studies are piling up showing how exercising your body
boosts the fitness of you brain as well. Exercise has
documented benefits for learning and memory, executive
decision making function, mood regulation, and even
protection against brain injury from an accident.
The latest piece comes from Dr. Ronald Duman's group at
Yale, just published in Nature Medicine. Using a high tech
screening approach, researchers looked at how certain genes
change their activity levels in the brain after exercise.
Working out Your Brain
Specifically, they looked at a part of the brain called the
hippocampus, which has known roles in learning and memory,
the regulation of stress, and is one of the brain regions
targeted by anti-depressants.
In the study, researchers gave mice either free access to
exercise wheels in their cages or not. The study revealed
that several genes increase their activity in the
hippocampus following a week of voluntary exercise.
One gene that dramatically increased its activity was VGF,
or vascular growth factor. This gene was originally named
for its role in inducing new blood vessel growth but we now
know that it has other roles as well. It's not known if
increased blood supply to parts of the brain are involved
in the exercise benefit, but I suspect that it probably is.
Beyond its potential blood flow benefits, VGF is
interesting because it belongs to a larger family of growth
factors that we already suspected to play roles in
depression. Growth factors are involved in the growth and
maintenance of all kinds of things, including neurons and
blood vessels.
Depressed Mice?
Believe it or not, using carefully designed studies,
researchers can actually evaluate depression-like behaviors
in mice. When the authors of the new study looked at these
behaviors, they found that the exercised mice showed fewer
depressive behaviors than their non-exercised controls.
This shows that exercise helps alleviate depression
behavior (which we already knew) but does not show that it
was due to the increases in VGF activity. However, further
studies by the group showed that injecting VGF into the
animals had the same anti-depressive affects as exercise.
Furthermore, when they looked at other mice that have
naturally low VGF activity, they found that these mice had
increased depressive-like behaviors.
This provides strong evidence that VGF plays a role in
mediating the anti-depressive affect of exercise.
I'm sure that pharmaceutical companies are now looking at
VGF related compounds for new anti-depressants. But the
point of this article is not to suggest that you can get
all the benefits of exercise by injecting VGF (It's not
available anyway, yet).
The point is that exercise is incredibly beneficial to your
brain and body. VGF is just one example of many protective
systems turned on by exercise.
Just Move
In our part of the world, we're moving into the winter,
making it more difficult to get outside and run around. But
there are still many things that you can do to keep your
brain and body fit through the cold months.
You could: join a gym, get exercise equipment into your
house (and use it), buy an exercise tape or DVD, join a
recreational volleyball or basketball program or other
sport you enjoy; take a local fitness class or just brave
the weather and go for a brisk walk.
Making exercise a habit will help you keep your brain
healthy throughout life. Many people today don't get much
exercise once they reach middle age. This may have been
fine 100 years ago when the average life expectancy was
about 55. Today, many of us will likely live past 80 or 90
years old. How many years do you have left? How many of
those years to you want to have a healthy brain?
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