WANT TO KEEP YOUR BRAIN HEALTHY? STAY PHYSICALLY FIT

As the ancient Romans already knew (remember "a sound mind in a healthy body"?), physical and mental fitness are connected.  Now, two millenia later, new research may tell us why.

Dr. Jonathan Repple, at the University of Muenster, in Germany, and his colleagues were able to study over 1000 MRI brain scans of healthy volunteers, with an average age of 29. They supplemented the scans with a test of physical endurance and a dozen cognitive tests.

 High contast brain scan

Credit: Nevit Delmin/Wikimedia

As has been shown in previous research studies, the researchers found that physical fitness and cognitive functioning were strongly correlated.  What was new was their finding that this correlation was mediated by the integrity and connectivity of the white matter of the subjects' brains.

White matter consists of long, insulated nerve fibers that transmit information rapidly from one part of the brain to another.  Fitter subjects had better brain connectivity, and those with better brain connectivty scored better across the board on cognitive tests.

(This finding makes subjective sense if you consider how much of our thinking consists of making connctions.)

The researchers didn't expect to find such a strong relationship between physical fitness, brain health and cognition in healthy young people. "To see this happening in 30 year olds is surprising," Repple says. "This leads us to believe that a basic level of fitness seems to be a preventable risk factor for brain health."

Still, this correlative study could not determine is whether improving people's fitness will improve the health of their white matter and/or boost their cognitive performance. "We see that fitter people have better brain health," says Repple. "So we now need to ask whether actually making people fitter will improve their brain health. Finding this out is our next step."

Stay tuned. And in the meantime, just in case, stay fit.

Robert Adler

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You can find the research paper, White matter microstructure mediates the association between
physical fitness and cognition in healthy, young adults; at:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49301-y 1

MRI SCANS REVEAL AUTISTIC BRAIN DIFFERENCES AT SIX MONTHS OF AGE

Although symptoms of autism don't usually appear until a child's second year, and most autistic children aren't diagnosed until they are three or older, recent research shows that the brains of 6-month-old infants who will go on to develop autism already differ from those of normal infants.

These findings may lead to earlier diagnosis and more effective treatment for children who are at risk of developing autism.

They also provide more evidence, if that's still needed, that autism is not caused by childhood vaccinations. As Robert Emerson, the study's lead author points out, "If these differences are already present at six months of age, they would represent a biological foundation for autism that is in place before several vaccines on the CDC schedule that are administered after six months of age, including the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) inoculation, which is typically given at one year."

A child showing autistic symptoms

Credit Kfagan6

Emerson and colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while children slept to track brain size, growth and connectivity in 59 infants who were at high risk for autism because they had autistic older siblings. Twenty percent of them could be expected to develop autism, compared to 1.5 percent of children without autistic siblings.

They found a variety of differences between the brains of infants who went on to develop autism and those who didn't.

In keeping with earlier research, those infants who eventually showed autistic symptoms had a faster rate of growth in brain volume and brain surface area between six months and two years of age. 

The researchers then used advanced artificial intelligence techniques to differentiate between the brains of those infants who did or did not develop autism. Machine-learning programs trained themselves on the brain scans, and were eventually able to identify correctly 82 percent of the children--9 of 11--who would become autistic and 100 percent of those who developed normally.

This very high rate of discrimination was based on nearly 1000 "functional correlations"--how separate regions of the brain connect and work together--that differed between infants who were on autistic versus normal developmental paths.

Schematics representing brain scan signatures at six months that predicted later autism diagnosis in infants. Red bars indicate weaker connections in autistic infant brains, blue bars stronger connections.

[Credit: R.W. Emerson et al., Science Translational Medicine (2017)]

The authors caution that these are preliminary results using state-of-the-art technology, so further research and the development of simpler and less expensive brain-scanning techniques are needed before they can be applied clinically. 

"If future studies confirm these results, detecting brain differences may enable physicians to diagnose and treat autism earlier than they do today," says Diana Bianchi, M.D., Director or the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD).

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), one child out of every 68 in the US will be diagnosed with autism. The earlier that those children can be correctly diagnosed and start to receive treatment--while the brain is most malleable--the better their outcomes.

You can find a summary of an earlier Nature article about this research here, and a link to the abstract of the current study, in Science Translational Medicine, at this URL.

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