Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Gray Matter Volume | Hacker News Reader

Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Gray Matter Volume

mayoclinicproceedings.org

70 pointslxm12 comments

Conclusion:

> Cardiorespiratory fitness was positively associated with GM volume, total brain volume, and specific GM and white matter clusters in brain areas not primarily involved in movement processing. These results, from a representative population sample, suggest that CRF might contribute to improved brain health and might, therefore, decelerate pathology-specific GM decrease.

Given that the brain uses roughly 20% of the body's energy, it doesn't seem terribly surprising that cardiovascular/respiratory fitness would positively correlate with brain "fitness". What seems surprising is how big the difference is. ~5cm³ of grey matter. That's a couple of grapes!

That ~5cm is for 1 standard deviation increase in VO2peak. The charts show it increasing linearly with VO2peak. Too bad VO2max decreases with age (due to a linear fall off in max heart rate with age). I highly recommend Bay Area cycling.

What about for those of us that don’t live in the Bay Area? Are our brains condemned?

It depends on how safely one can cycle elsewhere. I wouldn't know, so I won't recommend it (but if it is possible, definitely!). But there are other options, such as rowing, running, Nordic skiing, swimming, etc.

My area seems to average about a 30 AQI, which I guess is good (it's 28 today). But I stopped biking a long time ago do to safety after many incidents, there's just no safe place to ride a bike in most of the US. To be fair, riding a motorcycle is far more dangerous, and people still do that. So I guess it is up to your risk tolerance.

Except for the fact that the Bay Area has some of the worst air pollution in the country [1], and air pollution exposure is positively associated with loss of white matter [2].

So I would say maybe it's a wash?

1 - https://www.lung.org/our-initiatives/healthy-air/sota/city-r...

2 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6132565/

It would be cool to upload you own scan and get GM volume, it might motivate the intelectual types to exercise more, if they could see visually the gains (the GM gains)

Do you even maximize your grey matter volume, bro?

Never skip brain day.

I literally laughed out loud at this. Well done.

I hope something like that is available in the future! I'm so glad I read this today because my lazy voice almost convinced me I don't need the gym.

Let me be first to mention link between amount of endurance activity and serum level of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). NIH is down for me, at least, so all I can offer is for you to google it and around it, it may change your life.

The longer you train, the higher elevation is. On the other hand, the longer one trains, the longer fitness stays.

(by the way, walking 35 km per week in average has been shown as stopping of brain mass decline in some important parts of brain, related to internal organ regulation, learning, higher order functions and long term memory)

Thus, nothing surprising here.

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