Time to pump up your hippocampus.
Scientists have long known that exercise fights depression and keeps participants mentally alert. Now comes news that working out can halt age-related shrinking in the part of the brain called the hippocampus and even increase its size.
This pays off in better spatial memory, learning abilities and memory.
For those of you who stayed awake in biology: The hippocampus is located inside the medial temporal lobe, beneath the cortical surface. It has left and right mirror structures in the brain, filled with dense layers of neurons. These hippocampi play an important role in spatial memory, which helps humans negotiate their physical environment. They are shaped like seahorses, hence the name.
When the horrible Alzheimer's disease strikes, the damage first appears here, doctors say.
Researchers from the universities of Pittsburgh and Illinois report that about 40 percent of the added brain power fit people have over the unfit comes from this region of the brain. They found a straight path from physical fitness to growth in the hippocampus to improvements in spatial memory.
"The higher-fit people have a bigger hippocampus, and the people that have more tissue in the hippocampus have a better spatial memory," says Illinois psychology researcher Art Kramer.
His partner in the study, Kirk Erickson of Pitt, adds: "This is really a clinically significant finding because it supports the notion that your lifestyle choices and behaviors may influence brain shrinkage in old age.
"Basically, if you stay fit, you retain key regions of your brain involved in learning and memory."
Kramer says even without the team's findings, there are excellent memory-related reasons for staying in shape as you age:
"Even ignoring the hippocampus data, we see there is this significant and substantial relationship between how fit you are and how good your memory is."
The study was of 165 seniors, ages 59 to 81.
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