Researchers in Ottawa have added another item to the long list of potential benefits of regular exercise: repairing brain damage.
A team at the Ottawa Hospital and the University of Ottawa have a group of physically active mice to thank for their findings, which were announced by the university earlier this week.
The mice had been genetically modified to have smaller cerebellums, the part of the brain that controls things like balance and muscular activity. On average, they were living only 25 to 40 days, and weren’t able to walk as easily as normal rodents.
“We talked about trying to rescue these mice and were thinking about adding a gene back to recover the mice,” said Dr. David Picketts, a senior scientist at the Ottawa Hospital and professor at the University of Ottawa.
But one of Picketts’ PhD students, Matias Alvarez-Saavedra, had a different idea. He placed exercise wheels in some of the cages, and as the mice ran, something amazing happened.
The exercise triggered the production of a molecule, VGF nerve growth factor, which helped to increase the protective coating around each mouse’s brain neurons. As their brains healed, the mice gained weight and their motor co-ordination improved. They also lived for more than a year, which is a pretty normal mouse lifespan.
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A study outlining the results has now been published in the journal Cell Reports. The possible implications are very exciting, said Picketts.
“VGF is produced normally by the body and it’s expressed upon exercise,” he explained. “In a normal individual it isn’t really required, but in a diseased brain we found that it really had a big effect.”
While much more work will be needed to determine how the healing process would work in a human brain, the researchers believe that their discovery could one day help patients battling illnesses like multiple sclerosis.
“With multiple sclerosis, you get a lot of degeneration of the (neuron) insulation, and patients with MS go through these relapses and remissions,” Picketts said.
“We’re really hoping that maybe if we could use VGF to limit the number of degenerations, (it would) really allow remissions to be more prevalent and longer.”
There’s a lot of research out there that proves that exercise is very important for brain health and general well-being, Picketts noted, but hardly anyone has looked at which specific molecules and molecular pathways are being stimulated when we engage in physical activity.
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There’s nothing to suggest that the VGF molecule is produced only by running. Any kind of physical exercise that works your muscles might do the trick, Picketts confirmed, but it’s hard to get mice to do sit-ups to prove that theory.
More work will now be needed to nail down exactly how the VGF molecule is stimulating better neuron insulation, and whether the molecule could be introduced into the body through a drug rather than produced naturally through exercise.
The study proves that basic research can lead to big discoveries, Picketts said, even if they are accidental.
“Funding has been really cut to a lot of the discovery and basic science research,” he said.
“We need to remember that while it’s great to push translational research and try to move things into the clinic, we still need to try to understand them at a basic science level.”
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