exercise to improve autism? How Working the Muscles May Boost Brainpower

[Guest guest]

" The results, published in the journal Learning and Memory

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3032576/>, showed that the

[exercise-mimic] drugged animals' brains also contained far more new

neurons in brain areas central to learning and memory than the brains of

the control mice, an effect found by microscopic examination. "

May 9, 2012, 12:01 am

How Working the Muscles May Boost Brainpower

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/how-working-the-muscles-may-boost-brain\

power/

Upending the cliché of muscleheads, scientists at the Laboratory of

Neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging recently set out to

examine whether changes in muscles prompted by exercise might

subsequently affect and improve the brain's ability to think.

Lab animals and people generally perform better on tests of cognition

after several weeks of exercise training, and studies have shown that

over time, running and other types of endurance exercise increase the

number of neurons in portions of the brain devoted to memory and

learning. But the mechanisms that underlie this process remain fairly

mysterious. Do they start within the brain itself? Or do messages arrive

from elsewhere in the body to jump-start the process?

The researchers were especially interested in the possibility that the

action starts outside the brain -- and specifically in the muscles. " We

wondered whether peripheral triggers might be activating the cellular

and molecular cascades in the brain that led to improvements in

cognition, " says Henriette van Praag, the investigator at the National

Institute on Aging who led the study.

Muscles are, of course, greatly influenced by exercise. Muscle cells

respond to exercise by pumping out a variety of substances that result

in larger, stronger muscles. Some of those compounds might be entering

the bloodstream and traveling to the brain, Dr. van Praag says.

The problem is that exercise is such a complicated physiological

stimulus that it's very difficult to isolate which compounds are

involved and what their effects might be. So she and her colleagues

decided to study " fake " exercise instead, using two specialized drugs

that had been tested several years ago by scientists at the Salk

Institute in San Diego. The drugs had been shown to induce the same

kinds of changes in sedentary animals' muscles that exercise would

cause, so that even though the mice didn't exercise, they

physiologically responded as if they had....