Exercise Strengthens the Brain, According to a New South Carolina Study

Everytime I write for this website, I feel like I'm here to tell you the scientific sky is falling when it comes to the brain in particular. Concussions are serious business, but where the hell is all the good news? I think for as gloomy as some of the material I slave over this hot computer is, I've always been interested in keeping it nuanced enough to avoid falling into some hyperbolic trap.

On the concussion tip, I do think rather than discourage individuals from participating in a place that promotes healthy living (like contact sports), we simply keep them properly educated. Sports are invaluable, and as an institution for discipline, and exercise (at a time when this nation gets so little that the next generation is primed to be the first in history not to outlive their predecessors), we should encourage kids to play roles on that particular stage.

And so scientists out of the University of South Carolina have illuminated the effect of exercise on the brain. We've always been aware of the cellular thumbprint exercise leaves on the body. Mitochondria are to your cells what electricity is to a city. They act as the cell's power centers, and spawning new mitochondria within muscle cells due to exercise has always been an axiom of cellular civilization.

But can exercise spawn mitochondrial growth in cells within the brain? The preliminary answer is 'yes'. To start, scientists split a group of mice into two groups. One group, "the GSP mice", were assigned a certain amount of time spent exercising on mini treadmills. The other group, who we'll call the "Nick Diaz fanboy" mice, just sat around all day doing nothing of any significance whatsoever, and who were probably posting youtube videos of themselves defending petulant behavior when separated from their Dorito naps. The results?     

At the end of the two months, the researchers had both groups complete a run to exhaustion on the treadmill. Not surprisingly, the running mice displayed much greater endurance than the loungers. They lasted on the treadmills for an average of 126 minutes, versus 74 minutes for the unexercised animals.

More interesting, though, was what was happening inside their brain cells. When the scientists examined tissue samples from different portions of the exercised animals’ brains, they found markers of upwelling mitochondrial development in all of the tissues. Some parts of their brains showed more activity than others, but in each of the samples, the brain cells held newborn mitochondria.

What makes this work fascinating, as Gretchon Reynolds notes, is the implications for neurodegenerative diseases. Ok so I lied, and we're back to talking about depressing stuff, but the implication here is the potential role mitochondria plays in say, a brain disease like Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Do CTE recipients in contact sports lack a proper reservoir of mitochondria that might otherwise help in putting them less at risk?