After the age of thirty your brain starts to shrink. The process starts very, very slowly, but as you get older the rate at which this happens starts to rise. If you live long enough dementia is inevitable, you might think. Psychologists at the university of Pittsburgh discovered that you can reverse the brain’s decline by running three times a week for 40 minutes.

Aging & hippocampus
One of the important organs in the brain is the hippocampus. The better this organ functions, the better your memory. In a 60 year old the hippocampus shrinks by 1-2 percent a year. sounds alarming – and it is – but neurologists regard this an inevitable consequence of aging.

Nevertheless, there are indications that physical exercise can delay, stop and maybe even reverse this process. If you get elderly people to run for an hour at 70 percent of their maximal heart rate three times a week, their brain volume will have increased after six months. [J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2006 Nov; 61(11): 1166-70.] reviews suggest that cardio training helps the brains of healthy old people to function better. [Cochrane database Syst Rev. 2008 Jul 16;(3): CD005381.]

Study
The researchers did an experiment with 120 healthy men and women with an average age of 66. half of the test subjects did stretch exercises three times a week for a year; the other half ran for 40 minutes three times a week at 60-75 percent of the VO2max. That’s at a pace at which it starts to get impossible to hold a conversation.

Results
The volume of the hippocampus of the subjects that did stretch exercises decreased during the course of the experiment. The opposite happened in the subjects that ran: the volume of the hippocampus increased by two percent in these subjects.

The researchers measured the subjects’ maximal oxygen uptake to assess their fitness and discovered that the fitter the subjects became, the more their hippocampus grew.

BDNF
The researchers also figured out how training caused the hippocampus to grow. Running boosted the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor [BDNF]. BDNF has approximately the same effect on the brain as anabolic steroids have on muscle tissue.

Lastly, the researchers got their subjects to do memory tests. The more the hippocampus had grown, the better the memory scores.

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Exercise training increases size of hippocampus and improves memory.
Abstract

The hippocampus shrinks in late adulthood, leading to impaired memory and increased risk for dementia. Hippocampal and medial temporal lobe volumes Camiseta Real Madrid are larger in higher-fit adults, and physical activity training increases hippocampal perfusion, but the extent to which aerobic exercise training can modify hippocampal volume in late adulthood remains unknown. here we show, in a randomized controlled trial with 120 older adults, that aerobic exercise training increases the size of the anterior hippocampus, leading to improvements in spatial memory. Camiseta Ajax exercise training increased hippocampal volume by 2%, effectively reversing age-related loss in volume by 1 to 2 y. We also demonstrate that increased hippocampal volume is associated with greater serum levels of BDNF, a mediator of neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus. Hippocampal volume declined in the control group, but higher preintervention fitness partially attenuated the decline, suggesting that fitness protects against volume loss. Caudate nucleus and thalamus volumes were unaffected by the intervention. These theoretically important findings indicate that aerobic exercise training is effective at reversing hippocampal volume loss in late adulthood, which is accompanied by improved memory function. failure to demonstrate that memory improvement is due either to aerobic exercise or increased hippocampal volume. [Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011] Both the body and brain benefit from exercise: potential win-win for Parkinson’s disease patients. [Mov Disord. 2011]

PMID: 21282661 [PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE] PMCID: PMC3041121

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