How Excercise Impacts the Highway System in your Brain

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Have you ever been stuck in a traffic jam, frustrated at the slow crawl towards your destination? Just like how a well-planned highway system can prevent congestion and keep traffic moving smoothly, your brain relies on a similar system to process information. The brain can be thought of as a collection of cities (grey matter) connected by highways (white matter). Grey matter is responsible for processing information and controlling your body, while white matter plays an important role in communicating between different grey matter brain regions, acting like a highway system to allow information to travel quickly and efficiently. This fast communication system is essential for the coordination of many functions, such as thinking, memory, and movement. For example, when we play soccer, we have to pay attention to our surroundings, remember the rules, and kick and run. Without properly functioning white matter, signals would travel more slowly, potentially impairing mental capacity and coordinated movement as it would be harder for different brain regions to work together. Thus, healthy white matter is important for brain function, just like how maintaining highway roads is important for smooth transportation.

Changes in white matter have been associated with diabetes, a condition that is linked to greater risk of cognitive impairment. For example, there is evidence that there is decreased white matter volume and disrupted white matter organization in prediabetes. As such, maintaining and/or improving brain health is crucial in diabetes. Many studies have previously found that exercise improves cognitive function. A recent study conducted by researchers at Western University aimed to investigate how different types of exercise affected white matter in older adults who were at-risk for diabetes. Study participants were randomly allocated to complete either 1) six months of resistance training classes, which involved exercises like squats and lifting weights, or 2) six months of balance and tone classes, which consisted of stretching and lower-intensity exercises. White matter in the brain was measured using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which takes detailed images of internal body structures using a strong magnet and radio waves. MRI images were taken before and after the six months of exercise classes.

This study found that both types of exercise resulted in changes to various white matter parameters, but in different ways. Balance and tone exercises led to white matter changes that correlated with increased mobility, improved learning, and better performance on item memory tasks (i.e., memorizing photos of people and places). In contrast, resistance training exercises led to white matter changes that correlated with improved performance on both item memory tasks and associative memory tasks (i.e., memorizing connections between different photos). 

Overall, the findings from this study suggest that different types of exercise may target and strengthen different highways of the brain. A combination of both resistance training and balance and tone exercises could be beneficial for both cognitive function and motor function, particularly in older adults who are at-risk for diabetes. So, if you want to keep the traffic on your brain's “highways” flowing smoothly and ensure that information can travel without delay, staying active is an essential part of maintaining a healthy brain.

Original Article: Lien, R., Furlano, J. A., Witt, S. T., Xian, C., & Nagamatsu, L. S. (2024). The effects of a six-month exercise intervention on white matter microstructure in older adults at risk for diabetes. Cerebral circulation - cognition and behavior, 7, 100369. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cccb.2024.100369