HHS HealthBeat (November 5, 2010)

Walking the brain

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Taking up walking or other moderate activity can help an older person’s body – and a study indicates it also could help the brain. A researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign saw that in brain scans of 65 people ages 59 to 80 who took up walking 40 minutes, three times a week.

Art Kramer looked at more than coherence among signals in individual parts of the brain. He looked at coordination among networks of the brain – the connectivity that links different parts in thinking. He found people who exercised also had better brain coordination:

``Fitness makes it more correlated, so it’s not just the coherence in the networks but the coordination among the networks.’’  (6 seconds)

The study in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Learn more at hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: May 7, 2011