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Can Parkinson’s disease be prevented by exercise? - The Washington Post
But studies have found it actually doesn’t have to be every day or even for very long. A 2010 study of over 200,000 people found that men and women in their 30s who engaged in one to three hours per week of moderate to vigorous exercise had a significantly lower risk of getting Parkinson’s disease later in life (for men, by 17 percent and for women, by 39 percent). That risk declined even further with more hours exercised each week. For seven or more hours, for example, men had a 30 percent reduced risk and women had a 53 percent reduced risk.
Nighttime Exercise Breaks May Extend Sleep by 27 Minutes - Neuroscience News
The results, which are based on 28 participants, show that after the activity breaks, participants slept for an additional 27 minutes on average, compared with prolonged sitting.
Association of step counts over time with the risk of chronic disease in the All of Us Research Program - PubMed
The relationship between steps per day and incident disease was inverse and linear for obesity (n = 368), sleep apnea (n = 348), gastroesophageal reflux disease (n = 432) and major depressive disorder (n = 467), with values above 8,200 daily steps associated with protection from incident disease. The relationships with incident diabetes (n = 156) and hypertension (n = 482) were nonlinear with no further risk reduction above 8,000-9,000 steps.
Primary care providers’ physical activity counseling and referral practices and barriers for cardiovascular disease prevention - PMC
Our analyses used data from DocStyles 2015, a Web-based panel survey of 1251 PCPs. Overall, 58.6% of PCPs discussed physical activity with most of their at-risk patients. Among these PCPs, the prevalence of components offered ranged from 98.5% encouraging increased physical activity to 13.9% referring to intensive behavioral counseling. Overall, only 8.1% both discussed physical activity with most at-risk patients and referred to intensive behavioral counseling. Barriers related to PCPs’ attitudes and beliefs about counseling (e.g., counseling is not effective) were significantly associated with both discussing physical activity with most at-risk patients and referring them to intensive behavioral counseling (adjusted odds ratio, 1.92; 95% confidence interval, 1.15–3.20). System-level barriers (e.g., referral services not available) were not. Just over half of PCPs discussed physical activity with most of their at-risk patients, and few both discussed physical activity and referred patients to intensive behavioral counseling. Overcoming barriers related to attitudes and beliefs about physical activity counseling could help improve low levels of counseling and referrals to intensive behavioral counseling for CVD prevention.
Why is exercise good for you? Scientists are finding answers in our cells
In 2020, Snyder and his colleagues took blood samples from 36 people aged between 40 and 75 years old before, during and at various time intervals after the volunteers ran on a treadmill. The team used multiomic profiling to measure more than 17,000 molecules, more than half of which showed significant changes after exercise9. They also found that exercise triggered an elaborate ‘choreography’ of biological processes such as energy metabolism, oxidative stress and inflammation.
High-intensity Exercise Can Reverse Neurodegeneration in Parkinson’s Disease < Yale School of Medicine
Following the six-month program, brain imaging showed a significant increase in both the neuromelanin and DAT signals in the substantia nigra. This suggests that high-intensity exercise not only slowed down the neurodegenerative process, but also helped the dopaminergic system grow healthier.
“Where we would have ordinarily expected to see a decline in the DAT and neuromelanin signals, we saw an increase,” says Bart de Laat, PhD, associate professor adjunct in psychiatry and the study’s first author. “We had hoped to see that the neurodegeneration would not progress as quickly or stop temporarily, but instead we saw an increase in nine out of 10 people. That was remarkable.”
The study highlights the importance of including an exercise regimen as part of one’s Parkinson’s treatment plan. “The medications we have available are only for symptomatic treatment. They do not change the disease course,” says Tinaz. “But exercise seems to go one step beyond and protect the brain at the neuronal level.”
High-intensity Exercise Can Reverse Neurodegeneration in Parkinson’s Disease < Yale School of Medicine
Prior research has shown that many forms of exercise are linked to improved symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. But there has been no evidence that hitting the gym could create changes at the brain level. Now, a small proof-of-concept study involving 10 patients showed that high-intensity aerobic exercise preserved dopamine-producing neurons, the brain cells that are most vulnerable to destruction in patients with the disease.
In fact, after six months of exercise, the neurons actually had grown healthier and produced stronger dopamine signals. Dopamine is a chemical that helps brain cells communicate with each other.
He was treated for blood clots but still felt fatigued and breathless - The Washington Post
Porter’s history of blood clots for no apparent reason, his continued shortness of breath and chest pain, along with the results of the VQ scan and other tests strongly suggested one diagnosis: chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH).
This rare form of pulmonary hypertension is caused by clots that clog arteries, forming scar tissue that adheres to blood vessels in the lungs, narrowing the vessels and impeding blood flow.
Experts estimate that between 2 and 5 percent of people with blood clots will develop CTEPH, which doesn’t respond to blood thinners.
But unlike other forms of pulmonary hypertension, CTEPH can be cured by a pulmonary thromboendarterectomy (PTE), a long, complex and demanding operation to remove clots. Nonsurgical treatment involves medication, but is not curative.
Exercise Is Even More Effective Than Counselling or Medication for Depression - Neuroscience News
When comparing the size of the benefits of exercise to other common treatments for mental health conditions from previous systematic reviews, our findings suggest exercise is around 1.5 times more effective than either medication or cognitive behaviour therapy.
The Future of Strength Training - Outside Online
The bigger and clearer the signal your brain sends to your muscles, the more force you’ll produce. And that signal-sending capability is trainable. Back in 2021, I wrote about a fascinating study in which locked-down pro basketball players gained strength by doing six weeks of completely imagined strength workouts three times a week. Similarly, lifting a light weight while imagining that you’re lifting a heavier one—i.e. trying as hard as you can, even if you don’t need to—produces greater strength gains.
What Happens When One Twin Exercises and the Other Doesn’t - Outside Online
All the twin pairs came in for physical examinations, and the results were pretty much what you’d expect. The exercising twins had higher VO2 max (38.6 vs. 33.0 ml/kg/min), smaller waist circumference (34.8 vs. 36.3 inches), lower body fat (19.7 vs. 22.6 percent), significantly less abdominal fat and liver fat, and so on. The study is free to read if you want to dig further into the details, but the results aren’t surprising. Exercise clearly improves a bunch of health parameters, and genes clearly matter too—after all, the differences aren’t that big.
How to Weaponize Your Inner Monologue - Outside Online
In a 2014 study, for example, a research team led by Samuele Marcora, then at Bangor University in Wales, recruited 24 volunteers and taught half of them to use positive self-talk during exercise. The process was simple: after performing a cycling test to exhaustion, the subjects wrote down thoughts that had occurred to them while pedaling, identified the positive ones, then used those during at least three subsequent workouts. Two weeks later, they repeated the cycling test. Sure enough, the self-talk group lasted 18 percent longer, while the control group experienced no change. The reason, the research team determined, was that although subjects were performing at the same level, those who altered their self-talk rated the effort easier during the second test.
New research finds exercise time of day matters for metabolism - Levels
The range of metabolites detected in the various tissues was from 596 in the hypothalamus to 894 in the blood. Each tissue responded uniquely to exercise at each time point. For instance, in response to exercise, the hypothalamus had 17 metabolites change in the evening and 33 in the morning, whereas in the blood, 61 metabolites changed in the evening and 195 in the morning. Exercise altered more metabolites in the morning than evening in all tissues.
Resistance exercise may be superior to aerobic exercise for getting better ZZZs -- ScienceDaily
Among the 42% of participants who were not getting at least 7 hours of sleep at the study's start, sleep duration increased by an average of 40 minutes in 12 months for the resistance exercise group, compared to an increase of about 23 minutes in the aerobic exercise group, about 17 minutes in the combined exercise group and about 15 minutes in the control group.
Sleep efficiency increased in the resistance exercise and combined exercise groups, but not in the aerobic exercise or no exercise group.
Sleep latency decreased slightly, by 3 minutes, in the group assigned to resistance exercise only, with no notable change in latency in the other participant groups.
Exercise post-vaccine bumps up antibodies, new study finds -- ScienceDaily
In the newly published study, participants who cycled on a stationary bike or took a brisk walk for an hour-and-a-half after getting a jab produced more antibodies in the following four weeks compared to participants who sat or continued with their daily routine post-immunization. The researchers found similar results when they ran an experiment with mice and treadmills.
Antibodies are essentially the body's "search and destroy" line of defense against viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites. Vaccines help the immune system learn how to identify something foreign and respond by bolstering the body's defenses, including an increase in antibodies.
Scientists dive deep into the different effects of morning and evening exercise -- ScienceDaily
New insights include a deeper understanding of how tissues communicate with each other, and how exercise can help to 'realign' faulty circadian rhythms in specific tissues -- faulty circadian clocks have been linked to increased risks of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Finally, the study identified new exercise-induced signaling molecules in multiple tissues, which need further investigation to understand how they can individually or collectively influence health.
"Not only do we show how different tissues respond to exercise at different times of the day, but we also propose how these responses are connected to induce an orchestrated adaptation that controls systemic energy homeostasis," says Associate Professor Jonas Thue Treebak from CBMR at the University of Copenhagen, and co-first author of the publication.
Exercise alters brain chemistry to protect aging synapses: Enhanced nerve transmission seen in older adults who remained active -- ScienceDaily
Honer and Casaletto found that elderly people who remained active had higher levels of proteins that facilitate the exchange of information between neurons. This result dovetailed with Honer's earlier finding that people who had more of these proteins in their brains when they died were better able to maintain their cognition late in life.
To their surprise, Honer said, the researchers found that the effects ranged beyond the hippocampus, the brain's seat of memory, to encompass other brain regions associated with cognitive function.
"It may be that physical activity exerts a global sustaining effect, supporting and stimulating healthy function of proteins that facilitate synaptic transmission throughout the brain," Honer said.
Uncovered: Key to how exercise protects against consequences of aging -- ScienceDaily
The team of scientists at the Monash University Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI), led by Professor Tony Tiganis, reveals that reductions in skeletal muscle reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation during ageing is instrumental in the development of insulin resistance. According to Professor Tiganis, skeletal muscle constantly produces ROS and this is increased during exercise.
"Exercise-induced ROS drives adaptive responses that are integral to the health-promoting effects of exercise," he said.
In a paper published Dec. 15 in the journal Science Advances, the research team show how an enzyme called NOX-4 is essential for exercise-induced ROS and the adaptive responses that drive metabolic health.
Anxiety effectively treated with exercise -- ScienceDaily
Most individuals in the treatment groups went from a baseline level of moderate to high anxiety to a low anxiety level after the 12-week program. For those who exercised at relatively low intensity, the chance of improvement in terms of anxiety symptoms rose by a factor of 3.62. The corresponding factor for those who exercised at higher intensity was 4.88. Participants had no knowledge of the physical training or counseling people outside their own group were receiving.
Crosstalk among muscles and fat
After the rodents’ resistance exercise, which consisted of walking around, though, the animals’ leg muscles appeared depleted of miR-1. At the same time, the vesicles in their bloodstream now thronged with the stuff, as did nearby fat tissue. It seems, the scientists concluded, that the animals’ muscle cells somehow packed those bits of microRNA that retard hypertrophy into vesicles and posted them to neighboring fat cells, which then allowed the muscles immediately to grow.
The bidirectional relationship between sense of purpose in life and physical activity: a longitudinal study | SpringerLink
An increase in sense of purpose in life was associated with higher physical activity four years later, above and beyond past activity levels. Physical activity was positively associated with future levels of sense of purpose in life, controlling for prior levels of purpose in life.
Keeping fit with HIIT really does work: Short bursts of activity you can easily do at home keep your fitness up -- ScienceDaily
The findings of this study show that low-volume HIIT (typically involving less than ~20 mins total exercise time -- inclusive of warm up and cool down) yields comparable improvements to interventions meeting the current guidelines despite requiring significantly less time.
So, what is low-volume HIIT? As HIIT involves active periods of work interspersed with recovery periods, the researchers defined low-volume HIIT as interventions which included less than 15 minutes of high intensity exercise per session (not including recovery periods).
This review builds on the authors' recent study published in Diabetes Care which showed that as little as 4-min of HIIT 3 times per week for 12 weeks significantly improved blood sugar levels, fat in the liver, and cardiorespiratory fitness in adults with type 2 diabetes. They also showed that these improvements were comparable to an intervention involving 45-min of moderate intensity aerobic exercise (2).
Exercise promotes healthy living and a healthy liver -- ScienceDaily
Remarkably, ultrasound elastography revealed that the exercise regimen reduced liver steatosis by an additional 9.5%, liver stiffness by an additional 6.8%, and the FibroScan-AST Score (a measure of liver fibrosis) by an additional 16.4% over the weight-loss regimen.
Additionally, the exercise regimen altered the circulating concentrations of specific organokines and apparently induced anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidative stress responses through activation of the Nrf2 (nuclear factor E2-related factor 2), an oxidative stress sensor. It also enhanced the phagocytic capacity of Kupffer cells which help maintain liver function.
Exercise boosts blood flow to the brain, study finds: The results add to growing evidence that exercise programs may help older adults slow the onset of memory loss and dementia -- ScienceDaily
Scientists have previously shown that lower-than-usual levels of blood flow to the brain, and stiffer blood vessels leading to the brain, are associated with MCI and dementia. Studies have also suggested that regular aerobic exercise may help improve cognition and memory in healthy older adults. However, scientists have not established whether there is a direct link between exercise, stiffer blood vessels, and brain blood flow.
"There is still a lot we don't know about the effects of exercise on cognitive decline later in life," says C. Munro Cullum, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry at UTSW and co-senior author of the study. "MCI and dementia are likely to be influenced by a complex interplay of many factors, and we think that, at least for some people, exercise is one of those factors."
In the study, Zhang, Cullum, and their colleagues followed 70 men and women aged 55 to 80 who had been diagnosed with MCI. Participants underwent cognitive exams, fitness tests, and brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Then they were randomly assigned to either follow a moderate aerobic exercise program or a stretching program for one year. The exercise program involved three to five exercise sessions a week, each with 30-40 minutes of moderate exercise such as a brisk walk.
Migraineurs Not Taking Advantage of an 'Effective Prophylactic'
Depression was reported by 47% of patients who reported no exercise compared with 25% of people who reported the recommended amount of weekly exercise.
Anxiety was reported by 39% of people who did not exercise compared with 28% of those who got the recommended 150+ minutes of exercise. Sleep problems were reported by 77% of the nonexercisers versus 61% of those who achieved the recommended exercise amount.
Exercise also appeared to reduce the risk for migraine attacks.
Can 4 Seconds of Exercise Make a Difference? - The New York Times
So, they recruited 39 of them, men and women aged 50 to 68 who were sedentary but had no other major health concerns. They tested the volunteers’ current aerobic fitness, muscular power and mass, arterial flexibility, and ability to perform what are called “activities of daily living,” such as getting up out of a chair.
The volunteers began visiting the performance lab three times a week. There, they completed a brief workout of repeated four-second intervals on the lab’s specialized bikes. At first, they sprinted for four seconds, with Dr. Allen calling out a second-by-second countdown, followed by 56 seconds of rest, repeating that sequence 15 times, for a total of 60 seconds of intervals.
Over two months, though, the riders’ rest periods declined to 26 seconds and they increased their total number of sprints to 30 per session.
At the end of eight weeks, the scientists retested everyone and found substantial differences. On average, riders had increased their fitness by about 10 percent, gained considerable muscle mass and strength in their legs, reduced the stiffness of their arteries and outperformed their previous selves in activities of daily living, all from about three to six minutes a week of actual exercise.
