Exercise Effects on Brain Health and Learning From Minutes to Months
Last updated on July 2021Recruitment
- Recruitment Status
- Recruiting
- Estimated Enrollment
- Same as current
Summary
- Conditions
- Sedentary Lifestyle
- Type
- Interventional
- Phase
- Not Applicable
- Design
- Allocation: RandomizedIntervention Model: Parallel AssignmentMasking: Double (Participant, Outcomes Assessor)Primary Purpose: Basic Science
Participation Requirements
- Age
- Between 55 years and 80 years
- Gender
- Both males and females
Description
Animal models robustly support that exercise protects brain areas vulnerable to aging such as the hippocampus and that these benefits lead to better learning. In contrast, there are mixed findings from human studies on the cognitive benefits of exercise with healthy older adults. This contrast indic...
Animal models robustly support that exercise protects brain areas vulnerable to aging such as the hippocampus and that these benefits lead to better learning. In contrast, there are mixed findings from human studies on the cognitive benefits of exercise with healthy older adults. This contrast indicates there is still a lack of understanding for how exercise could change the course of cognitive decline in aging adults. However, no human studies have comprehensively tested exercise effects on cognition in older adults with learning tasks inspired from basic exercise neuroscience. The objective in the proposed research is to fill this translational gap by determining if different types of exercise improve the same kinds of learning in older adults that have been shown to improve in animal models by improving hippocampal function. This will bring the investigators closer to a long-term goal of determining how exercise protects the brain from adverse effects of aging in order to develop interventions that minimize age-related cognitive decline. The overall hypothesis is that exercise improves learning when it increases functional hippocampal-cortical communication that otherwise declines with aging. The investigators will test this in a sample of healthy older adults by determining if increases in functional hippocampal-cortical connectivity from exercise training improve learning on an array of tasks that require the hippocampus for acquisition of new relational memories compared to conditions of the same tasks that should not require the hippocampus for learning and memory.
Tracking Information
- NCT #
- NCT03114150
- Collaborators
- Not Provided
- Investigators
- Principal Investigator: Michelle W Voss, PhD University of Iowa