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(iStock \/ Getty Images) <\/p>\n(iStock \/ Getty Images) <\/p>\n
If you need another reason to visit the gym this winter, a new study of almost 1,200 healthy, middle-aged men and women found that those with more muscle mass tended to have younger brains than those with less muscle.<\/p>\n
The findings, which were presented in Chicago this month at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, add to growing evidence that building and maintaining muscle mass as we age could be key to building and maintaining brain health, too.<\/p>\n
The researchers also found that those with high levels of deep belly fat had older brains, raising\u00a0questions about the potentially negative effects of some types of body fat on the brain and how important it may be to combine weight training with weight loss, if we would like our brains to stay youthful.<\/p>\n
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Why exercise is good for brains<\/p>\n
The idea that exercise is good for our brains is hardly new. Past studies in rodents have shown that after exercise, the animals\u2019 brains teem with a neurochemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. Sometimes referred to as \u201cMiracle-Gro for the brain,\u201d BDNF helps spark the creation of new neurons. So it\u2019s not surprising that after exercise, mouse and rat brains typically sprout two or three times as many new brain cells as the brains of sedentary animals. The exercising animals also ace rodent intelligence tests.<\/p>\n
People who exercise also show large increases in BDNF in their bloodstreams afterward.<\/p>\n
Other studies have shown that as few as 25 minutes a week of walking, cycling, swimming or similar exercise can be strongly linked to greater brain volume in older people, while taking as few as 3,000 steps a day helps slow cognitive decline in people at high risk for Alzheimer\u2019s disease.<\/p>\n
But most of this research involved aerobic exercise and the brain effects of endurance. Fewer studies have looked at the role of muscle mass. Many questions also remain about the role of body fat on brain health, especially the deep, interior fat around our bellies known as visceral fat, which can increase inflammation throughout the body, including, potentially, in the brain.<\/p>\n
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Is your brain young or old?<\/p>\n
For the new study, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and other institutions decided to look deep inside people\u2019s body tissues and brains with magnetic resonance imaging.<\/p>\n
They turned to existing whole-body scans of 1,164 healthy men and women in their 40s, 50s or early 60s. \u201cTo understand dementia risk, we\u2019ve got to focus on midlife,\u201d said Cyrus Raji, an associate professor of radiology and neurology at Washington University School of Medicine and the study\u2019s senior author. It\u2019s in middle age that we typically start to develop – or avoid – most of the common risk factors for later dementia, he said, making it a critical time period to study.<\/p>\n
The scientists used artificial intelligence to analyze the scans and determine people\u2019s total muscle mass and body fat. The body fat was characterized as either visceral or subcutaneous, a different type of fat found just beneath our skin.<\/p>\n
The researchers figured out the apparent age of people\u2019s brains using algorithms based on scans of tens of thousands of other brains. These provided benchmarks of typical brain structure and volume for someone of any age. People\u2019s brains could either match the benchmarks for their chronological age, or look like those of people younger or older. Older-looking brains face heightened risks for early cognitive decline.<\/p>\n
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More muscle means younger brains<\/p>\n
The researchers found that the amounts of people\u2019s muscle mass and their visceral fat were both strongly linked to their apparent brain age, though in opposing ways.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe larger the muscle bulk, the younger-looking the brain,\u201d Raji said. \u201cAnd the more visceral fat that was present, the older-looking the brain.\u201d People whose ratio of visceral fat to muscle mass was especially high – meaning they had a relatively large level of visceral fat and low muscle mass – tended to have the oldest-looking brains. (Subcutaneous fat was not linked to brain age in any way.)<\/p>\n
The study didn\u2019t look at how muscle and fat affect brains, but both tissues release a variety of biochemicals that can travel to the brain and jump-start various processes there, Raji said. The substances from muscles tend to promote the creation and integration of brain cells and neuronal connections; those from visceral fat do the reverse.<\/p>\n
On a practical level, the findings underscore that resistance exercise \u201cis super important\u201d for healthy brain aging, Raji said. Most of us begin losing muscle mass in middle age, but strength training can slow or even reverse that decline.<\/p>\n
Shedding visceral fat is likewise a good idea for our brains, he said. Both aerobic and resistance exercise will target visceral fat. Using weight-loss drugs such as Wegovy and other GLP-1 drugs can also substantially reduce visceral fat. But many people taking the drugs will drop muscle mass, Raji said – unless they also lift weights.<\/p>\n
The study has limitations. It hasn\u2019t been published or peer-reviewed. Because it\u2019s not an experiment, it also can\u2019t show that more muscle and less belly fat cause brains to age more slowly – only that those conditions are all linked to each other.<\/p>\n
But its findings are plausible and align with those of a growing number of other studies, said Fang Yu, director of the Roybal Center for Older Adults Living Alone with Cognitive Decline at Arizona State University in Phoenix. She studies exercise and aging but was not involved with the new study.<\/p>\n
Essentially, the study\u2019s message is simple, actionable and even rhymes: If you want a younger, healthier brain, Raji said, \u201cstrength train.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(iStock \/ Getty Images) If you need another reason to visit the gym this winter, a new study…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":202075,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[499,13284,103,61,60,106708,106709],"class_list":{"0":"post-202074","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fitness","8":"tag-fitness","9":"tag-happiness","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-vitality","14":"tag-young-at-heart"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}