It has been observed that humans and also lab animals usually execute enhanced performance at the assessments of cognition after quite a few weeks of exercise or training. Studies have also revealed that eventually over time, endurance exercises and running boost the number of neurons in sections of the brain dedicated to learning and memory. But the methods still remain vague and mysterious.
The scientists were particularly paying attention in the option that this action begins outside our brain and distinctively in our muscles. They were searching if secondary triggers were the cause of activating the molecular flows in our brain and led to enhancements in our cognition.
Muscles are, without any doubt, are greatly subjective to exercise. Muscle cells pump out various substances resulting in stronger and also larger muscles. Some of these substances might enter to the brain through the bloodstream.
Exercise is actually a very complex physiological stimulus and therefore it is difficult to recognize what substance is making the changes. So the researchers tried to study ‘fake’ exercise. That is using two specific drugs which was tested formerly by another researcher that induced the same types of changes in inactive animal muscles that work out would normally cause but it was observed that the physiology responded as if the animals had exercised.
The first drug helped production of AMPK that is an enzyme. Ordinary regular stamina exercises such as cycling or running increases the muscles’ manufacture of this enzyme AMPK that affects the metabolism.
The second was a cholesterol drug and this drug stimulated biochemical modifications in their muscle cells like those originated by stamina or endurance exercise. But this drug was also responsible for amplifying the endurance mainly in animals that ran, and allowed them to run farther than other sets of running mice without consumption of this drug.
By the use and feeding of these drugs in sedentary animals under controlled circumstances, the researchers sought to agree on whether alteration and variations in muscles initiates changes in the brain. And it did turn out that muscles affected their minds. After consumption of either drug for a week and without exercising, the mice did perform considerably improved on tests of learning and memory than the control mice that did not exercise or consumed the drugs.
The results were published in the journal Learning and Memory. And it showed that the animals that consumed the drugs also possessed many more new neurons in their brains that is, in regions essential to memory and learning compared to the brains of the controlled mice. This effect was established by the microscopic assessment.
