During pregnancy, the bone hormone osteocalcin is produced by the mother; it crosses the placenta, to reach the fetus, where it promotes the formation of the hippocampus and the development of spatial learning and memory. Postnatally, osteocalcin crosses the blood-brain barrier (BBB), to act in various regions of the brain, including the hippocampus, where it causes changes in brain chemistry that help prevent anxiety and depression and improve spatial learning and memory.
Image credit: Gerard Karsenty, MD, PhD and Franck Oury, PhD/Columbia University Medical Center

Bone Hormone Influences Brain Development and Cognition

Findings could lead to new treatments for memory loss, anxiety, and depression

Researchers from Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) have found that the skeleton, acting through the bone-derived hormone osteocalcin, exerts a powerful influence on prenatal brain development and cognitive functions such as learning, memory, anxiety, and depression in adult mice. Findings from the mouse study could lead to new approaches to the prevention and treatment of neurologic disorders. The study was published today in the online edition of Cell.

“The brain is commonly viewed as an organ that influences other organs and parts of the body, but less often as the recipient of signals coming from elsewhere, least of all, the bones,” said study leader Gerard Karsenty, MD, PhD, Paul A. Marks Professor of Genetics and Development, professor  of medicine, and chair of the Department of Genetics and Development.

“In an earlier study, we showed that the brain is a powerful inhibitor of bone mass accrual,” he said. “This effect was so powerful that it immediately raised the question, ‘Does the bone signal back to the brain to limit this negative influence?’ ‘If so, what signals does it use and how do they work?’”

Dr. Karsenty suspected that osteocalcin, a hormone recently identified by his lab and secreted by osteoblasts, might be involved in such bone-to-brain signaling. Earlier studies had shown that osteocalcin affects a variety of processes, such as energy expenditure, glucose balance, and male fertility. “Since most hormones influence a range of physiological processes, it was reasonable to assume that the endocrine functions of osteocalcin were even broader than what was already known,” he said.

To determine whether osteocalcin did indeed play a role in the brain, Dr. Karsenty and his team studied “osteocalcin-null” mice (mice that have been genetically engineered to not produce any osteocalcin). Using these mice, they were able to show unambiguously that osteocalcin can cross the blood-brain barrier; binds to neurons in the brainstem, midbrain, and hippocampus (which is responsible for learning and memory); promotes the birth of neurons; and increases the synthesis of several neurotransmitters, including serotonin, dopamine, and catecholamine. They also found that osteocalcin-null mice had abnormally small hippocampi, a part of the brain involved in memory.

The researchers then hypothesized that the changes in neurotransmitter synthesis should alter the animals’ behavior. In a series of behavioral tests, they confirmed that osteocalcin-null mice exhibit increased anxiety and depression-like behaviors, as well as impaired learning and memory, compared with normal mice.

These changes are similar to those seen in the aging population. “As we age, bone mass decreases, and the production of osteocalcin probably does, too,” said Dr. Karsenty. “We’re currently looking into this. It is not inconceivable that treatments that boost osteocalcin levels or stimulate osteocalcin receptors could help counter the cognitive effects of aging and aging-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s.”

When adult osteocalcin-null mice were infused with osteocalcin, their anxiety and depression did decrease, “but the infusions didn’t affect learning and memory or the size of the hippocampus,” said Dr. Karsenty. “This was perplexing, so we did another experiment—a postnatal knockout of osteocalcin (a genetically engineered model in which the synthesis of osteocalcin is blocked after birth). These mice were anxious and depressed but had normal memory and hippocampus structure. The unavoidable conclusion of the two experiments was that osteocalcin must act during development.” This led to the second part of their study.

In subsequent experiments, the researchers showed that osteocalcin crosses the placenta from mother to fetus and that this maternal pool of osteocalcin is necessary for formation of the hippocampus and the establishment of memory. Lastly, they showed that once-a-day injections of osteocalcin in osteocalcin-null mothers during pregnancy could prevent the development of behavioral abnormalities in their offspring.

“This finding could explain some of the effects observed in children born from undernourished mothers who develop, with an unusually high frequency, metabolic and psychiatric disorders just as osteocalcin-null mice do,” said Dr. Karsenty. “Malnutrition decreases the activity of bone cells; as a result, undernourished mothers have low bone mass, which affects osteocalcin production. This has clinical relevance even today, in developing countries, where maternal malnutrition is still common.”

Any therapies related to osteocalcin are still years away, however, he added.

Dolphins Have Longest Memories in Animal Kingdom

Marine mammals can remember their friends after 20 years apart, study says.

New experiments show that bottlenose dolphins can remember whistles of other dolphins they’d lived with after 20 years of separation. Each dolphin has a unique whistle that functions like a name, allowing the marine mammals to keep close social bonds.

The new research shows that dolphins have the longest memory yet known in any species other than people. Elephants and chimpanzees are thought to have similar abilities, but they haven’t yet been tested, said study author Jason Bruck, an animal behaviorist at the University of Chicago.

Bruck came up with the idea to study animal memory when his brother’s dog, usually wary of male strangers, remembered and greeted him four years after last seeing him. “That got me thinking: How long do other animals remember each other?”

I Remember You!

Bruck studied dolphins because their social bonds are extremely important and because there are good records for captive dolphins (as opposed to wild ones).

So he collected data from 43 bottlenose dolphins at six facilities in the U.S. and Bermuda, members of a breeding consortium that has swapped dolphins for decades and kept careful records of each animal’s social partners.

He first played recordings of lots of unfamiliar whistles to the dolphins in the study until the subjects got bored and stopped inspecting the underwater speaker making the sounds.

At this point, he played the whistles of the listening dolphins’ old friends.

When the dolphins heard these familiar whistles, they would perk up and approach the speakers, often whistling their own name and listening for a response.

Overall, the dolphins responded more to animals they’d known decades ago than to random animals—suggesting they recognized their former companions, according to the study, published recently in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Cheeky Dolphins

Working with animals as intelligent as dolphins was a challenge, Bruck added. The animals loved participating in the experiment so much that they’d often hover over the speaker, blocking the noise.

Others would begin “whistling directly at me as if I could understand them,” he said.

And one set of cheeky young dolphins swam up to Bruck and started whistling the names of the dominant males in their group in order of rank, perhaps suggesting the names they wanted to hear, Bruck said.

Memory Linked to Smarts?

Why dolphins—which live an average of 20 years in the wild—need long-term memory is still unknown. But it may have to do with maintaining relationships, since over time dolphin groups often break up and reorganize into new alliances.

This sort of social system is called “fission-fusion,” and it’s also seen in elephants and chimpanzees—two other highly intelligent and social beings.

Coincidence? Bruck suspects not: “It seems that maybe complex cognition comes from a place of trying to remember who your buddies are,” he said.

Breastfeeding Duration Appears Associated with Intelligence Later in Life

Breastfeeding longer is associated with better receptive language at 3 years of age and verbal and nonverbal intelligence at age 7 years, according to a study published by JAMA Pediatrics, a JAMA Network publication.

Evidence supports the relationship between breastfeeding and health benefits in infancy, but the extent to which breastfeeding leads to better cognitive development is less certain, according to the study background.

Mandy B. Belfort, M.D., M.P.H., of Boston Children’s Hospital, and colleagues examined the relationships of breastfeeding duration and exclusivity with child cognition at ages 3 and 7 years. They also studied the extent to which maternal fish intake during lactation affected associations of infant feeding and later cognition. Researchers used assessment tests to measure cognition.“Longer breastfeeding duration was associated with higher Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test score at age 3 years (0.21; 95% CI, 0.03-0.38 points per month breastfed) and with higher intelligence on the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test at age 7 years (0.35; 0.16-0.53 verbal points per month breastfed; and 0.29; 0.05-0.54 nonverbal points per month breastfed),” according to the study results. However, the study also noted that breastfeeding duration was not associated with Wide Range Assessment of Memory and Learning scores.

As for fish intake (less than 2 servings per week vs. greater than or equal to 2 servings), the relationship between breastfeeding duration and the Wide Range Assessment of Visual Motor Abilities at 3 years of age appeared to be stronger in children of women with higher vs. lower fish intake, although this finding was not statistically significant, the results also indicate.

“In summary, our results support a causal relationship of breastfeeding in infancy with receptive language at age 3 and with verbal and nonverbal IQ at school age. These findings support national and international recommendations to promote exclusive breastfeeding through age 6 months and continuation of breastfeeding through at least age 1 year,” the authors conclude.

Breastfeeding and Cognition: Can IQ Tip the Scale?

In an editorial, Dimitri A. Christakis, M.D., M.P.H., of the Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute, writes: “The authors reported an IQ benefit at age 7 years from breastfeeding of 0.35 points per month on the verbal scale and 0.29 points per month on the nonverbal one. Put another way, breastfeeding an infant for the first year of life would be expected to increase his or her IQ by about four points or one-third of a standard deviation.”

“However, the problem currently is not so much that most women do not initiate breastfeeding, it is that they do not sustain it. In the United States about 70 percent of women overall initiate breastfeeding, although only 50 percent of African American women do. However, by six months, only 35 percent and 20 percent, respectively, are still breastfeeding,” Christakis continues.

“Furthermore, workplaces need to provide opportunities and spaces for mothers to use them. Fourth, breastfeeding in public should be destigmatized. Clever social media campaigns and high-quality public service announcements might help with that. As with lead, some of these actions may require legislative action either at the federal or state level. Let’s allow our children’s cognitive function be the force that tilts the scale, and let’s get on with it,” Christakis concludes.

Birds and humans have similar brain wiring

You may have more in common with a pigeon than you realise, according to new research.

It shows that humans and birds have brains that are wired in a similar way.

A researcher from Imperial College London and his colleagues have developed for the first time a map of a typical bird brain, showing how different regions are connected together to process information. By comparing it to brain diagrams for different mammals such as humans, the team discovered that areas important for high-level cognition such as long-term memory and problem solving are wired up to other regions of the brain in a similar way. This is despite the fact that both mammal and bird brains have been evolving down separate paths over hundreds of millions of years.

The team suggest that evolution has discovered a common blueprint for high-level cognition in brain development.

Birds have been shown in previous studies to possess a range of skills such as a capacity for complex social reasoning, an ability to problem solve and some have even demonstrated the capability to craft and use tools.

Professor Murray Shanahan, author of the study from the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, says:

“Birds have been evolving separately from mammals for around 300 million years, so it is hardly surprising that under a microscope the brain of a bird looks quite different from a mammal. Yet, birds have been shown to be remarkably intelligent in a similar way to mammals such as humans and monkeys. Our study demonstrates that by looking at brains that are least like our own, yet still capable of generating intelligent behaviour, we can determine the basic principles governing the way brains work.”

The team developed their map by analysing 34 studies of the anatomy of the pigeon brain, which is typical for a bird. They focussed on areas called ‘hub nodes’, which are regions of the brain that are major centres for processing information and are important for high level cognition.

In particular, they looked at the hippocampus, which is important for navigation and long-term memory in both birds and mammals. They found that these hub nodes had very dense connections to other parts of the brain in both kinds of animal, suggesting they function in a similar way.

They also compared the prefrontal cortex in mammals, which is important for complex thought such as decision making, with the nidopallium caudolaterale, which has a similar role in birds. They discovered that despite both hub nodes having evolved differently, the way they are wired up within the brain looks similar.

The long-term goal of the team is to use the information generated from the wiring diagram to build computer models that mimic the way that animal brains function, which would be used to control a robot.

The study was published this month in the Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience journal.

Nicotinic receptor essential for cognition and mental health

The ability to maintain mental representations of ourselves and the world — the fundamental building block of human cognition — arises from the firing of highly evolved neuronal circuits, a process that is weakened in schizophrenia. In a new study, researchers at Yale University School of Medicine pinpoint key molecular actions of proteins that allow the creation of mental representations necessary for higher cognition that are genetically altered in schizophrenia. The study was released July 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Working memory, the mind’s mental sketch pad, depends upon the proper functioning of a network of pyramid-shaped brain cells in the prefrontal cortex, the seat of higher order thinking in humans. To keep information in the conscious mind, these pyramidal cells must stimulate each other through a special group of receptors. The Yale team discovered this stimulation requires the neurotransmitter acetylcholine to activate a specific protein in the nicotinic family of receptors — the alpha7 nicotinic receptor.

Acetycholine is released when we are awake — but not in deep sleep. These receptors allow prefrontal circuits to come “online” when we awaken, allowing us to perform complex mental tasks. This process is enhanced by caffeine in coffee, which increases acetylcholine release. As their name suggests, nicotinic alpha-7 receptors are also activated by nicotine, which may may help to explain why smoking can focus attention and calm behavior, functions of the prefrontal cortex.

The results also intrigued researchers because alpha7 nicotinic receptors are genetically altered in schizophrenia, a disease marked by disorganized thinking. “Prefrontal networks allow us to form and hold coherent thoughts, a process that is impaired in schizophrenia,” said Amy Arnsten, professor of neurobiology, investigator for Kavli Institute, and one of the senior authors of the paper. “A great majority of schizophrenics smoke, which makes sense because stimulation of the nicotinic alpha7 receptors would strengthen mental representations and lessen thought disorder.”

Arnsten said that new medications that stimulate alpha-7 nicotinic receptors may hold promise for treating cognitive disorders.

Publication of the PNAS paper comes on the eve of the 10^th anniversary of the death of  Yale neurobiologist Patricia Goldman-Rakic, who was hit by a car in Hamden Ct. on July 31, 2003. Goldman-Rakic first identified the central role of prefrontal cortical circuits in working memory.

“Patricia’s work has provided the neural foundation for current studies of molecular influences on cognition and their disruption in cognitive disorders,” said Arnsten. “Our ability to apply a scientific approach to perplexing disorders such as schizophrenia is due to her groundbreaking research.”

Online games offer trove of brain data

Study of 35 million users of brain-training software finds alcohol and sleep linked to cognitive performance.

By trawling through data from 35 million users of online ‘brain-training’ tools, researchers have conducted a survey of what they say is the world’s largest data set of human cognitive performance. Their preliminary results show that drinking moderately correlates with better cognitive performance and that sleeping too little or too much has a negative association.

The study, published this week in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, analysed user data from Lumosity, a collection of web-based games made by Lumos Labs, based in San Francisco, California. Researchers at Lumos conducted the study in collaboration with scientists at two US universities as part of the Human Cognition Project, which the authors describe as “a collaborative research effort to describe the human mind”.

The authors examined results from more than 600 million completed tasks — which measured players’ speed, memory capacity and cognitive flexibility — to get a snapshot of how lifestyle factors can affect cognition and how learning ability changes with age.

Users who enjoyed one or two alcoholic drinks a day tended to perform better on cognitive tasks than teetotallers and heavier drinkers, whose scores dropped as the number of daily drinks increased. The optimal sleep time was seven hours, with performance worsening for every hour of sleep lost or added.

The study authors also looked at performance over time for users who returned to the same brain-training tasks at least 25 times. Performance decreased with age, but the ability to learn new tasks that relied on ‘crystallized knowledge’ (such as vocabulary) did not decline as quickly as it did for those that measured ‘fluid intelligence’ (such as the ability to memorize new sets of information).

Daniel Sternberg, a data scientist at Lumos who led the study, and his colleagues say that their study sample is much broader than those of most psychological studies, which tend to draw from pools of university students.

Buzzwords and biased samples?

But Frederick Unverzagt, neuropsychologist at Indiana University in Indianapolis, who has studied other cognitive-training tools such as training courses in verbal reasoning or speed processing in patients with dementia, says that the sample in this study is also biased: the users of brain-training tools are younger (compared to the typical dementia patients), most of them live in the United States or Europe and, most importantly, they are likely to already be interested in cognitive-training tasks. Although Lumosity has a pool of 35 million users, when the researchers looked at changes in performance over time, they focused on groups of about 22,000 people.

“From a trials perspective, this is very selective,” says Fred Wolinsky, a public-health researcher at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who has also studied the efficacy of brain-training techniques. “The lower performance scores they saw in older individuals,” he says, “could be attributable to the fact that the older adults were the ones who stuck with it for a long time because they were the ones who needed the training the most.”

And the findings are not controversial or particularly surprising. “But what is interesting and important is this idea that we can have a new paradigm for doing this kind of research: looking at large data sets in order to look at many different kinds of people, to tease out the demographic and lifestyle factors that influence cognition,” says Sternberg. “There are many other interesting questions that other researchers could answer by using this data set — this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

By trying it all, predatory sea slug learns what not to eat

Researchers have found that a type of predatory sea slug that usually isn’t picky when it comes to what it eats has more complex cognitive abilities than previously thought, allowing it to learn the warning cues of dangerous prey and thereby avoid them in the future.

The research appears in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Pleurobranchaea californica is a deep-water species of sea slug found off the west coast of the United States. It has a relatively simple neural circuitry and set of behaviors. It is a generalist feeder, meaning, as University of Illinois professor of molecular and integrative physiology and leader of the study Rhanor Gillette put it, that members of this species “seem to try anything once.”

Another sea slug species, Flabellina iodinea, commonly known as the Spanish shawl because of the orange outgrowths called cerata that cover its purple back, also lives off the west coast. Unlike Pleurobranchaea, however, the Spanish shawl eats only one type of food, an animal called Eudendrium ramosum. According to Gillette, the Spanish shawl digests the Eudendrium’s entire body except for its embryonic, developing stinging cells. The Spanish shawl instead transports these stinging cells to its own cerata where they mature, thereby co-opting its victim’s body parts for its own defense.

The story of Gillette’s Pleurobranchaea-Flabellina research began with a happy accident that involved showing a lab visitor Pleurobranchaea’s penchant for predation.

“I had a Pleurobranchaea in a small aquarium that we were about to do a physiological experiment with, and my supplier from Monterey had just sent me these beautiful Spanish shawls,” Gillette said. “So I said to the visitor, ‘Would you like to see Pleurobranchaea eat another animal?’”

Gillette placed the Spanish shawl into the aquarium. The Pleurobranchaea approached, smelled, and bit the purple and orange newcomer. However, the Flabellina’s cerata stung the Pleurobranchaea, the Spanish shawl was rejected and left to do its typical “flamenco dance of escape,” and Pleurobranchaea also managed to escape with an avoidance turn.

Some minutes later, his curiosity piqued, Gillette placed the Spanish shawl back into the aquarium with the Pleurobranchaea. Rather than try to eat the Spanish shawl a second time, the Pleurobranchaea immediately started its avoidance turn. (Watch a video of this interaction.)

“I had never seen that before! We began testing them and found that they were learning the odor of the Spanish shawl very specifically and selectively,” Gillette said.

Gillette and his team later replicated that day’s events by placing a Pleurobranchaea in a training arena 12-15 centimeters from a Spanish shawl, then recorded the Pleurobranchaea’s behavior. They returned the Pleurobranchaea to the arena for four more trials in 20-minute intervals, then repeated the procedure 24 and 72 hours later.

In the experiments, those Pleurobranchaea whose feeding thresholds were too high (meaning they were already full) or too low (they were extremely hungry) would either not participate or completely consume the Spanish shawl, respectively. Those that were hungry, but not ravenously so, continued to exhibit the avoidance-turn behavior when placed with the Spanish shawl even 72 hours later.

This showed that Pleurobranchaea was selective in its food choices, but only on a case-by-case basis; the sea slugs already trained to avoid the Spanish shawl would readily eat a species closely related to Flabellina called Hermissenda crassicornis.

Such behaviors come in handy in Pleurobranchaea’s natural environment, Gillette said.

“If you’re a generalist like Pleurobranchaea, it’s highly strategic and advantageous to learn what’s good and what’s not good so you can decide whether or not to take the risk or of attacking certain types of prey,” he said.

These findings show that the “simple” Pleurobranchaea is much more complex than originally thought.

“We already knew the neuronal circuitry that mediates this kind of decision,” Gillette said. “Finding this highly selective type of learning enlarges our perspective of function, in terms of the animal’s ability to make cost-benefit decisions that place it on a rather higher plane of cognitive ability than previously thought for many sea slugs.”

Rapid, Irregular Heartbeat May Be Linked to Problems with Memory and Thinking

People who develop a type of irregular heartbeat common in old age called atrial fibrillation may also be more likely to develop problems with memory and thinking, according to new research published in the June 5, 2013, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

“Problems with memory and thinking are common for people as they get older. Our study shows that on average, problems with memory and thinking may start earlier or get worse more quickly in people who have atrial fibrillation,” said study author Evan L. Thacker, PhD, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “This means that heart health is an important factor related to brain health.”

The study involved people age 65 and older from four communities in the United States who were enrolled in the Cardiovascular Health Study. Participants did not have a history of atrial fibrillation or stroke at the start of the study. They were followed for an average of seven years, and received a 100-point memory and thinking test every year. People who had a stroke were not included in this analysis after the stroke. Of the 5,150 participants, 552, or about 11 percent, developed atrial fibrillation during the study.

The study found that people with atrial fibrillation were more likely to experience lower memory and thinking scores at earlier ages than people with no history of atrial fibrillation. For example, from age 80 to age 85 the average score on the 100-point test went down by about 6 points for people without atrial fibrillation, but it went down by about 10 points for people with atrial fibrillation.

For participants ages 75 and older, the average rate of decline was about three to four points faster per five years of aging with atrial fibrillation compared to those without the condition.

“This suggests that on average, people with atrial fibrillation may be more likely to develop cognitive impairment or dementia at earlier ages than people with no history of atrial fibrillation,” Thacker said.

Thacker noted that scores below 78 points on the 100-point test are suggestive of dementia. People without atrial fibrillation in the study were predicted on average to score below 78 points at age 87, while people with atrial fibrillation were predicted to score below 78 points at age 85, two years earlier.

“If there is indeed a link between atrial fibrillation and memory and thinking decline, the next steps are to learn why that decline happens and how we can prevent that decline,” said Thacker.

A 20-minute bout of yoga stimulates brain function immediately after

Researchers report that a single, 20-minute session of Hatha yoga significantly improved participants’ speed and accuracy on tests of working memory and inhibitory control, two measures of brain function associated with the ability to maintain focus and take in, retain and use new information. Participants performed significantly better immediately after the yoga practice than after moderate to vigorous aerobic exercise for the same amount of time.

The 30 study subjects were young, female, undergraduate students. The new findings appear in the Journal of Physical Activity and Health.

“Yoga is an ancient Indian science and way of life that includes not only physical movements and postures but also regulated breathing and meditation,” said Neha Gothe, who led the study while a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Gothe now is a professor of kinesiology, health and sport studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. “The practice involves an active attentional or mindfulness component but its potential benefits have not been thoroughly explored.”

“Yoga is becoming an increasingly popular form of exercise in the U.S. and it is imperative to systematically examine its health benefits, especially the mental health benefits that this unique mind-body form of activity may offer,” said Illinois kinesiology and community health professor Edward McAuley, who directs the Exercise Psychology Laboratory where the study was conducted.

The yoga intervention involved a 20-minute progression of seated, standing and supine yoga postures that included isometric contraction and relaxation of different muscle groups and regulated breathing. The session concluded with a meditative posture and deep breathing.

Participants also completed an aerobic exercise session where they walked or jogged on a treadmill for 20 minutes. Each subject worked out at a suitable speed and incline of the treadmill, with the goal of maintaining 60 to 70 percent of her maximum heart rate throughout the exercise session.

“This range was chosen to replicate previous findings that have shown improved cognitive performance in response to this intensity,” the researchers reported.

Gothe and her colleagues were surprised to see that participants showed more improvement in their reaction times and accuracy on cognitive tasks after yoga practice than after the aerobic exercise session, which showed no significant improvements on the working memory and inhibitory control scores.

“It appears that following yoga practice, the participants were better able to focus their mental resources, process information quickly, more accurately and also learn, hold and update pieces of information more effectively than after performing an aerobic exercise bout,” Gothe said. “The breathing and meditative exercises aim at calming the mind and body and keeping distracting thoughts away while you focus on your body, posture or breath. Maybe these processes translate beyond yoga practice when you try to perform mental tasks or day-to-day activities.”

Many factors could explain the results, Gothe said. “Enhanced self-awareness that comes with meditational exercises is just one of the possible mechanisms. Besides, meditation and breathing exercises are known to reduce anxiety and stress, which in turn can improve scores on some cognitive tests,” she said.

“We only examined the effects of a 20-minute bout of yoga and aerobic exercise in this study among female undergraduates,” McAuley said. “However, this study is extremely timely and the results will enable yoga researchers to power and design their interventions in the future. We see similar promising findings among older adults as well. Yoga research is in its nascent stages and with its increasing popularity across the globe, researchers need to adopt rigorous systematic approaches to examine not only its cognitive but also physical health benefits across the lifespan.”