Fighting Alzheimer’s disease

I often talk about the benefits of maintaining your strength as it relates to healthy bones, and joints… building endurance, managing weight, lowering body fat, even promoting psychological well-being and reducing feelings of depression and anxiety. But what effect (if any) does muscle strength have on the brain?

Exciting new research shows that there is an important link between physical and brain health in aging. The new study, published in the November (2009) issue of the Archives of Neurology, adds to mounting evidence suggesting that Alzheimer’s disease affects motor function, as well as cognition.

Patricia Boyle, PhD, from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago said, “It is likely that there is a common pathology or disease process underlying the association of muscle strength with cognition. It also is possible that the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease plays a role.”

Investigators looked at more than 900 community-based older people without dementia at baseline evaluation. They tested strength in 9 different muscle groups. A total of 138 people developed Alzheimer’s disease during a mean follow-up of more than 3 years.

Now here’s what they leaned about muscle and the brain; they discovered that one unit of muscle strength was associated with approximately a 43% decrease in the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. WOW!

Dr. Boyle said, “These findings suggest that maintenance of physical function is vital. We certainly think it is important to encourage older people to remain active and work to keep their muscles strong. Good physical health is important for good brain function.”

I don’t know about you but I find that very encouraging! It’s yet one more thing to add to the long list of things that keep me motivated to workout vigorously every day.

Improve your brainpower

A single workout with moderate intensity can make you brainier. In a study at a  University in Germany, exercisers who ran just two three-minute sprints, with a two-minute break in between, learned new words 20 percent faster than those who rested. Getting your heart pumping increases blood flow, delivering more oxygen to your brain. It also spurs new growth in the areas of the brain that control multitasking, planning, and memory.

In another study scientists reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences say that running has a profound impact on the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory. Adult mice that voluntarily used running wheels (wait a minute, does that mean that some mice did not volunteer? How does that work?  Sorry, I digress.) Anyway, they discovered that the mice that volunteered to run, increased their number of brain cells and performed better at spatial learning tests than non-exercising mice.

Spatial learning refers to the ability to navigate through or discriminate between the unfamiliar- such as telling the difference between two patterns, or finding your way around a new city. Spatial memory refers to how you remember the location or layout of the objects in the space around you. You record spatial memories after processing key sensory information, such as what you see and hear. Animals use spatial memory to remember where their food bowl is located. Mice, for example, learn this by scrambling through a maze to find the food at the end.

In the latest spatial learning experiment, researchers learned that the running mice were better able to tell the difference between the locations of two adjacent identical stimuli. This ability was closely linked to an increase in new brain cell growth in the hippocampus.

Until the late 1990s, neuroscientists believed that we did not grow new brain cells after birth, however, ongoing mice experiments have repeatedly shown that running boosts the number of new brain cells.

So chalk up yet another reason to workout! Mounting evidence continues to reveal that exercise triggers significant physiological and structural changes in the brain that are beneficial to cognitive function.

And finally, the next time you can’t remember where you put your glasses or keys, you might want to just start running.