By Gregory Kellett, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at SFSU and science writer for Lumos Labs.
It turns out there may be a link between cardiovascular fitness and the size of one’s hippocampus, a portion of the brain important for the formation of new memories.
Researchers from the University of Illinois and the University of Pittsburgh, looked at the cardiovascular fitness of 165 adults between the ages of 59 and 81. They also measured (via MRI) the size of each participant’s hippocampus and tested for spatial reasoning abilities.
What they found:
- Elderly adults who are physically fit tend to have larger hippocampi than those who are less fit.
- Having a larger hippocampus is correlated with better performance on spatial memory tasks.
Exercise has been linked to hippocampus size and spatial memory in rodents, but this is the first study to demonstrate a similar relationship in humans.
This is good news because although variable between individuals, it is well established that the hippocampus typically shrinks with age and that this shrinkage is associated with subtle but definite declines in memory and spatial orientation.
References:
Erickson, K. I., Prakash, R. S., Voss, M. W., Chaddock, L., Hu, L., Morris, K. S., et al. (2009). Aerobic fitness is associated with hippocampal volume in elderly humans. Hippocampus.
Kitabatake, Y., Sailor, K. A., Ming, G., & Song, H. (2007). Adult neurogenesis and hippocampal memory function: new cells, more plasticity, new memories? Neurosurgery Clinics of North America, 18(1), 105-13, x.
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