A study confirms that any type of exercise rejuvenates the brain

2024-12-16 11:00:00

Regular physical activity is a key part of a healthy lifestyleand has a wide range of positive effects on our health. Despite this, it is estimated that more than half of the Spanish population leads an excessively sedentary lifestyle.

Among the reasons for adopting the habit of doing physical activity with a certain regularity, a particularly interesting one is benefits for cognitive and neurological health. A large body of evidence already available points in this direction, and scientists continue to find more evidence of the impact of physical activity on our nervous system.

Real-time improvements

Now, a new study has found that daily physical activity can increase short-term processing speed in the brain, according to what its authors publish in specialized media Annals of Behavioral Medicine. Specifically, these researchers found that doing activities every day, regardless of their intensity, can provide a short-term improvement in mental reaction time similar to a four-year reduction in cognitive age.

This is the result of monitoring a group of volunteers for seven days, during which they answered surveys on their cell phones five times a day. The advantage of this method is that it involves a data collection practically in real time.

In these surveys they were questioned on the one hand about the activities they were carrying out and on the other hand they were questioned rapid outpatient assessments of cognitive performance. In this way the authors were able to verify in great detail the effects of exercise on cognitive functions.

Benefits regardless of intensity

There are studies that have found that as we age, our brain’s cognitive processing speed may decrease slow down to a rate of up to about 15 milliseconds per year. Well, in this case it was observed that the participants who carried out physical activity daily showed increases in that same parameter of approximately 60 milliseconds after doing their exercises, which is equivalent in a certain sense to ‘getting younger’ four years in this aspect.

Although the volunteers classified their activities so that the researchers could estimate the intensity of the exercise performed, they found that cognitive benefits were observable in all cases, which supports the scientifically supported idea that any form of physical exercise is generally positive for our health.

By its design, this work cannot provide insight into the exact mechanisms through which exercise can improve our cognitive health, especially in such a short period. It is generally believed that changes brought about by blood circulation activity can have a beneficial effect on brain tissues. Be that as it may, this type of evidence is one more reason to remember how important it is lead an active lifestyle and physical exercise to take care of our health

References

Jonathan G Hakun, Lizbeth Benson, Tian Qiu, Daniel B Elbich, Mindy Katz, Pamela A Shaw, Martin J Sliwinski, Yasmin Mossavar-Rahmani. Cognitive health benefits of daily physical activity in a diverse sample of middle-aged adults. Annals of Behavioral Medicine (2024). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/abm/kaae059

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