Scientific American reveals how a new look at exercise’s effects in the brain might show the way to a one-two punch against Alzheimer’s disease:
Exercise has been shown to create biochemical changes that fertilize the brain’s environment to mend nerve cell health. Additionally, exercise induces restorative changes relevant to Alzheimer’s disease pathology with improved nerve cell growth and connectivity in the hippocampus, a process called adult hippocampal neurogenesis. For these reasons, the authors Choi et al. explored whether exercise-induced effects and hippocampal nerve cell growth could be utilized for therapeutic purposes in Alzheimer’s disease to restore brain function.
The researchers found that exercised animals from a mouse model of Alzheimer’s had greatly enhanced memory compared to sedentary ones due to improved adult hippocampal neurogenesis and a rise in amounts of a specific molecule that promotes brain cell growth called BDNF. Importantly, they could recover brain function, specifically memory, in mice with Alzheimer’s disease but without exercise by increasing hippocampal cell growth and BDNF levels using a combination of genetic—injecting a virus—and pharmacological means.
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Before translating these findings into human patients, there remains significant research to establish that a medication or drug could mimic the effects of exercise—exercise mimetics—by “cleaning up” the brain with BDNF and stimulating neurogenesis to combat Alzheimer’s disease.
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Original study is here.