It's been known for some time that exercise is not only good for your physical health, but it also helps to keep your mind sharp.
Specifically, it helps to prevent dementia, particularly Alzheimer's, and now scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital think they've figured out why.
A little hormone called irisin.
Exercise increases the hormone irisin, which has multiple benefits including regulating glucose and lipid metabolism, as well as aiding in turning white fat to brown fat.
It is also a hormone found in the human brain, but less so in the brains of people with Alzheimer's
Here's a little bit of the science talk:
"First, we found that irisin treatment led to a remarkable reduction of amyloid beta pathology," says Dr. Se Hoon Choi in a media release. "Second, we showed this effect of irisin was attributable to increased neprilysin activity owing to increased levels of neprilysin secreted from cells in the brain called astrocytes..."So, in short, hit the treadmill!
"Our findings indicate that irisin is a major mediator of exercise-induced increases in neprilysin levels leading to reduced amyloid beta burden, suggesting a new target pathway for therapies aimed at the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's disease," says Rudolph Tanzi, PhD, a senior author of the study and director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit.
If you exercise, according to The Left, it might make you a white supremacist.
But, of course, one thing we know for sure is that it's definitely good for your overall physical health and now it's clearly good for your...
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3 comments:
I read about this last week in one of the medical journals; touting exercise as a means of reducing exposure to/effects of Alzheimers plaques.
I think of a friend of mine who was an excellent skier, as well as a top-level competitor in his age class in Ironman Triathlons all over the country, constantly distance running every single morning, a man who had to eat to maintain a minimum weight,
and who is now hospitalized with this disease unable to feed himself or recognize his family.
I think the researchers should work a bit more on their hypothesis.
To put what Boron said in somewhat different words, one study never proves anything.
If it's not a randomized, controlled study, it's even worse than that. At best, the study helps point to where more the money should be spent for the more rigorous (and expensive) randomized, controlled tests that need to be done.
The vast majority of the stuff we get in the science press releases is junk. They can't prove cause and effect. All they can show is that things are correlated or not. Like fires and firemen and correlated. Does one cause the other? Can't say.
My dad was a statistician for the E. P. A. He was convinced that man made global warming was a myth, if for no other reasons, the environmentalist kept screwing up their own research. They would plan the research out, presented the plan to him or another statistician in order to determine if the results would be statistically valid. He would tell them what they had to change, and they would ignore him. They'd go out, get statistically meaningless results, and slap EPA study says on the front cover.
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