Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Alzheimer’s Disease
A recent study reported in the journal Neurology once again gives us more evidence about how important exercise may be for keeping your brain healthy.
The study looked at how fit two groups were. One group included people without memory problems and had an average age of about 72 years. The second group included people with Mild Cognitive Impairment and early Alzheimer’s disease. Their average age was about 74 years (this difference wasn’t statistically significant). Both groups included about the same number of men and women and were well-educated (many had at least some college-level education).
The researchers looked a measure of how well the lungs can use oxygen that’s referred to as “VO2 max.” It’s an index of how well the heart and the lungs work during exercise.
They looked at the brains of people in each group using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). From this, they could calculate how big several parts of the brain were.
They gave all the participants a battery of neuropsychological measures that assessed their thinking and memory abilities.
The researchers showed that for the people with memory problems (those with mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer’s disease) there was a relationship between fitness and how big the brains of the patients were. People who were more fit had bigger brains. They had more gray matter – that’s the part of the brain that includes nerve cells. (White matter has the fibers that connect the parts of the gray matter.)
For the people who didn’t have memory problems, there wasn’t a relationship between the size of the brain and fitness. But in this group, there was a relation between fitness and how well they did on the neuropsychological tests.
This study shows two things that are important. First, it confirms that people who are more fit do better on test of memory and other thinking skills. Since other studies have shown this, this isn’t new. Second, it shows that the size of the gray matter in the brain in people with early stages of memory loss is related to fitness. This is new, and gives us a clue about why physical fitness might be related to brain fitness.
One warning: like many studies about risk factors and memory loss, this study is only looks at the way two things are related. Researchers call this kind of study correlational, because it looks at the relation between two things using a statistical measure called correlation. It’s important to remember that in this kind of study, we don’t know which way the two things are related.
It may be that better fitness causes people to have more nerve cells. On the other hand, it may be that people with more nerve cells exercise more. So although this study continues to emphasize the importance of fitness, we should interpret it with a little bit of caution.
The study appeared in the journal Neurology, 71, 210-216 (July 15, 2008)
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- Meditation as Brain Training
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Mindfulness meditation as practiced over a long period by experts makes clear changes in someone’s brain function. But what about those of us who don’t have a few years to sit in a monastery in the Himalayas? A new study shows that even brief meditation practice can improve attention.
Researchers at Wake Forest University studied whether just four days of training (at just 20 minutes a day) could make a difference in participants’ mood, energy, and cognition. Undergraduate students (average age 22 years) either participated in the meditation sessions or spent a similar amount of time sitting quietly and listening to an audio book.
Participants in the meditation condition showed decreases in anxiety and improvements in several mental processing tasks compared to those in the audio book group. The meditators’ performance on one aspect of a working memory task (how many answers they got correct in a row) suggested that they may have improved their attention.
This is a small and very preliminary study that extends others’ work on meditation and the brain.It shows that even brief meditation practice can make a difference. you don’t have to be a Buddhist monk to learn to still your mind and pay better attention. Paying attention may be one of the most important things you can do to improve your brain’s functioning.
Reference:
Zeidan F et al.(in press) Mindfulness meditation improves cognition: Evidence of brief mental training. Consciousness and Cognition, doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.03.014
I saw an interesting blog post yesterday evening on the site of the Huffington Post about the potential benefits of meditation – or at least about what one woman thinks might be the benefits. Priscilla Warner writes about the contrast between Tibetan monks’ apparent calm, evident even on brain scans, and her own anxiety disorder. Ms. Warner says that she suffers from panic disorder, a severe form of anxiety in which a person can have multiple anxiety attacks every day, even in the middle of the night. Her post is titled “I Want the Brain of a Monk” Although most people don’t suffer from anxiety this severe, many people have symptoms of anxiety. And research has consistently shown that higher levels of anxiety are related to more memory problems.
What’s the relation to brain fitness? In my brain fitness class, I often mention the usefulness of meditation in helping reduce stress and anxiety, both of which have negative effects on memory. You don’t have to go to Tibet to get the benefits of meditation. If you simply take 10 minutes several times a day to break in to the ongoing rush of getting things done, you’ve made a start. Use those 10 minutes to sit quietly, relax your muscles, and breathe deeply.
If you do that every day for two weeks, I think you’ll notice that you feel calmer and better able to focus. And if you’re better able to focus, you will be better able to pay attention and remember things.
Although many people are excited about the potential for using computers to train their brains, we shouldn’t forget that other techniques have been used to the train the brain for many centuries. I’m thinking about the large number of techniques for meditation. While free computer software still requires an investment in a computer, meditation only asks you to sit or lie quietly and focus your mind.
A recently-published study shows parts of the brain in long-term meditators are larger than the same parts of the brain in people who don’t meditate. The article by Eileen Luders and her colleagues appeared in a recent issue of the journal Neuroimage (Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 672-678, April 15, 2009). The study showed that portions of the orbitofrontal cortex and the hippocampus were larger in persons who had been regular meditators for 5 or more years. The study is interesting because the parts of the brain that were larger are often thought to be important in helping people keep themselves emotionally balanced.
A number of strategies are likely to be helpful for meditators. There has been a great deal of interest over the last several years in mindfulness meditation. Researchers have studied how it can be used in reducing anxiety and depression. Mindfulness is based on Buddhist meditation (for a brief article, click here) but you don’t have to be a Buddhist to practice meditation. In fact, one of the most important persons who has promoted mindfulness is Jon Kabat-Zinn, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts. You can see a video presentation by him on YouTube by clicking here.
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