Sport Makes Middle-Aged People Smarter

High-intensity interval training makes middle-aged people not only healthier but smarter, showed a Montreal Heart Institute (MHI) study led by Dr. Anil Nigam of the MHI and University of Montreal, in collaboration with the Montreal Geriatric University Institute.

“We worked with six adults who all followed a four-month program of twice weekly interval training on stationary bicycles and twice weekly resistance training. Cognitive function, VO2max and brain oxygenation during exercise testing revealed that the participants’ cognitive functions had greatly improved thanks to the exercise,” Dr. Nigam said. VO2max is the maximum capacity of an individual’s body to transport and use oxygen during exercise. It impacts on the body’s ability to oxygenate the brain and is related to cognitive function.

“Our participants underwent a battery of cognitive, biological and physiological tests before the program began in order to determine their cognitive functions, body composition, cardiovascular risk, brain oxygenation during exercise and maximal aerobic capacity,” Dr. Nigam explained.

“After the program was finished, we discovered that their waist circumference and particularly their trunk fat mass had decreased. We also found that their VO2max, insulin sensitivity had increased significantly, in tandem with their score on the cognitive tests and the oxygenation signals in the brain during exercise,” Dr Nigam said. Insulin sensitivity is the ability of sugar to enter body tissue (mainly liver and muscle.)

New clues to how the brain and body communicate to regulate weight

Maintaining a healthy body weight may be difficult for many people, but it’s reassuring to know that our brains and bodies are wired to work together to do just that—in essence, to achieve a phenomenon known as energy balance, a tight matching between the number of calories consumed versus those expended. This careful balance results from a complex interchange of neurobiological crosstalk within regions of the brain’s hypothalamus, and when this “conversation” goes awry, obesity or anorexia can result.

Given the seriousness of these conditions, it’s unfortunate that little is known about the details of this complex interchange. Now research led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) provides new insights that help bring order to this complexity. Described in the October 26 issue of the journal Cell, the findings demonstrate how the GABA neurotransmitter selectively drives energy expenditure, and importantly, also help explain the neurocircuitry underlying the fat-burning properties of brown fat.

"Our group has built up a research program with the overall goal of unraveling the ‘wiring diagram’ by which the brain controls appetite and the burning of calories," says senior author Bradford Lowell, MD, PhD, a Professor of Medicine in BIDMC’s Division of Endocrinology and Harvard Medical School. "To advance our understanding to this level, we need to know the function of specific subsets of neurons, and in addition, the upstream neurons providing input to, and the downstream neurons receiving output from, these functionally defined neurons. Until recently, such knowledge in the hypothalamus has been largely unobtainable."