Walking Helps Heart and Brain

Aerobic exercise is known to benefit the heart, but researchers say that an aerobic workout may also build brain.

Regular aerobic exercise such as walking may safeguard the memory center in the brain, while stretching exercise may cause the center — called the hippocampus — to shrink, according to study. Regular aerobic exercise plays a significant role in preventing heart and blood vessel disease. 

Walking is an excellent aerobic activity that temporarily increases heart rate and blood pressure, leading to greater efficiency of the heart. Aerobic exercise can aide in weight loss and therefore improve cardiovascular risk.
 

The volume of the hippocampus is known to fall with age by between 1 percent and 2 percent a year, the researchers noted, leading to impaired memory and increased risk for dementia.

In addition, regular exercise helps individuals recovering from heart attacks and bypass surgery and lowers their risk of suffering a second heart attack.

In a randomized research including men and women in their mid-60s, walking three to four times a week for a year led to rises  the capacity of the hippocampus, which plays an significant role in memory, according to Dr. Arthur Kramer, of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Urbana, Ill., and colleagues.

Current procedures recommend brisk walking thirty minutes a day for all, and sixty minutes a day for those who need to reach their ideal weight. Aerobic exercise can aide in weight loss and therefore improve cardiovascular risk.

Decreasing the risk of heart disease may be your motivation to exercise often, particularly if you have risk factors you cannot control. 

The findings suggest that it’s possible to overcome the age-related decline in hippocampal volume with only enough exercise, Kramer told MedPage Today, leading to better fitness and perhaps to better spatial memory. “I don’t see a down side to it,” he said.

The number of the hippocampus is known to fall with age by between one percent and two percent a year, the researchers noted, leading to impaired memory and increased risk for dementia.

But animal research suggests that exercise reduces the loss of volume and preserves memory, they added.

Their fitness and memory were tested before the intervention, again after six months, and for a last time after a year. Magnetic resonance images of their brains were taken at the same times in order to measure the effect on the hippocampal volume.

To test the effect on humans, they enrolled one hundred twenty men and women in their mid-sixties and randomly assigned 60 of them to a program of aerobic walking three times a week for a year. The remaining 60 were given stretch classes three times a week and served as a control group.

The study showed that overall the walkers had a two percent increase in the volume of the hippocampus, compared with an average loss of about 1.4 percent in the control participants.

On the other hand, the study fell short of demonstrating a group effect on memory - both groups showed significant improvements both in accuracy and speed on a standard test. The apparent lack of effect, Kramer told MedPage Today, is probably a statistical artifact that results from large individual differences within the groups.

The researchers also found, improvements in fitness, measured by exercise testing on a treadmill, were significantly associated with increases in the volume of the hippocampus.

Analyses showed that that higher aerobic fitness levels at baseline and after the one-year intervention were associated with better spatial memory performance, the researchers reported.

On the other hand, larger hippocampi at baseline and after the intervention were associated with better memory performance, they reported.

The results “clearly indicate that aerobic exercise is neuroprotective and that starting an exercise regimen later in life is not futile for either enhancing cognition or augmenting brain volume,” the researchers argued.

The study was supported by the National Institute on Aging, the Pittsburgh Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center, and the University of Pittsburgh Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. The authors said they had no conflicts.

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