Physical Exercise May Fight Cognitive Decay

For those worried about maintaining the health of their brains, the solution could be just a short walk away. Recent studies on the relationship between physical exercise and brainpower indicate that exercise can slow or reverse brain decay, just as it does for muscles. Last year, a group of researchers led by Justin S. Rhodes, a professor at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, studied four different groups of mice living in different environments and found that the only important factor in improving their brains was whether the mice had a running wheel. In another study of 120 older men and women assigned to either walking or stretching regimens, the walkers increased the size of their hippocampi, the part of the brain that is essential to memory processes, after a year and performed better than the stretchers in cognitive tests.

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