Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois tested whether a simple walking program, nothing more demanding than that, could change the direction of that decline in older adults.
In a randomized trial of 120 older adults, a year of walking three times a week increased hippocampal volume by about 2 percent, effectively reversing one to two years of age-related shrinkage, while a comparison group doing only stretching exercises continued to lose volume over the same year.
Both groups improved on a spatial memory test, so walking did not beat stretching on memory itself, but walkers whose hippocampus grew more also gained more memory and had larger rises in BDNF, a growth factor tied to new brain cells. The trial ran one year in adults averaging about 66, and whether the gains persist over longer periods, or occur at other ages, was left for later studies to confirm.
Read the original study
Erickson et al., PNAS, 2011 · doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1015950108
A walking habit that grew the brain.
Source
- Erickson, K. I., Voss, M. W., Prakash, R. S., Basak, C., Szabo, A., Chaddock, L., Kim, J. S., Heo, S., Alves, H., White, S. M., Wojcicki, T. R., Mailey, E., Vieira, V. J., Martin, S. A., Pence, B. D., Woods, J. A., McAuley, E., & Kramer, A. F. (2011). Exercise training increases size of hippocampus and improves memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(7), 3017–22. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1015950108