Fish and/or exercise to help Alzheimer’s disease? Alzheimer’s disease background: Alzheimer’s disease is the leading neurodegenerative dementia disorder. In most cases Alzheimer’s does not appear until after the age of 60, but there is an early onset form. It is estimated that 5.1 million Americans have Alzheimer’s. With about 36 million American’s in the 60+…
Category: exercise
aging, brain health, cognitive function, exercise
Are there differences between physical and cognitive aging?
by Ward Plunet • • 1 Comment
Does physical decline directly mirror cognitive decline? In a previous post I pointed out how after the age of 25 the brain is losing a proportion of its mass. But when we examined various cognitive measurements we observe that the peak for some cognitive abilities do not occur until we reach our 50’s. What about…
brain hack, brain health, enriched environment, exercise
Can you teach an old dog new tricks – or at least juggling – and increase gray matter density in the brain ?
by Ward • • 2 Comments
Image via Wikipedia You might, or might not, be an old dog – but we all want to be able keep on learning and ‘growing’. Yesterday, I wrote about a couple papers that demonstrated how learning to juggle increased gray matter density in a particular region of the brain (middle temporal area of the visual…
brain hack, brain health, enriched environment, exercise
Learn juggling to increase your gray matter – but don’t stop
by Ward • • 4 Comments
Image via Wikipedia Maybe being a court jester is not all bad – you get to play music, which increases your brain’s gray matter and improves your general cognitive ability, and you get to entertain the court with your juggling skills, which you will find out, if you read the rest of this post, is…
brain fitness, brain health, enriched environment, exercise
Exercise for healthy new neurons: even in middle age
by Ward • • 3 Comments
Here is a follow-up to my Monday post on the quick rebound from an exercise layoff in the important brain health protein brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). A new paper published in the Journal of Applied Physiology examined running, BDNF, trkB, neurogenesis (new neurons), and neurite outgrowth (branching of the new neurons) in middle age rodents.…
brain fitness, brain health, exercise
A layoff results in aerobic deconditioning what about the brain?
by Ward • • 1 Comment
I have previously written a few times about how quickly deconditioning of aerobic fitness occurs after an exercise layoff (see here and here), but what about brain health? I have a perfect reason for writing this new piece because with my recent travel schedule (multiple cities, multiple meetings, etc), busy conferences, and maybe an extra…
exercise, lifespan, longevity
The testing of a new sirt1 activator: SRT1720
by Ward • • 2 Comments
SRT1720 is a sirt1 activator and the new hope for a calorie restriction mimicker, which may lead to an increase in human lifespan. Resveratrol (which I have written about several times, here, here and here) is also a sirt1 activator, which is found (in very small quantity) in red wine, is also a sirt1 activator…
exercise
Exercise training and muscle energy efficiency
by Ward • • 0 Comments
I am always encouraging people to exercise for the general and brain health. Research has demonstrated that exercise obviously improves muscle function and your performance. Additionally, while exercising a trained individual is more efficient biomechanically and biochemically (including increased fat oxidation and number of mitochondria). However, an unanswered question is the difference between trained and…
exercise
Moderation
by Ward • • 2 Comments
Today’s piece is not high level neurobiology, more like some thoughts on simple everyday approach to life. I have written previously about the importance of consistency in regards to exercise (and see the piece by Alan Couzens), which I think is related to moderation. I have two examples where I recently didn’t practice moderation, one…
brain fitness, exercise, neuroeconomics
How saving money is different, but also similar, to your exercise investment
by Ward • • 0 Comments
You might be scratching your head over my title but hopefully it will make sense at the end. We all now the importance of exercise for both our body and mental health. You can’t go a week or so without hearing about the latest research that provides evidence for what we all know at a…