By Free Republic | Created at 2024-11-23 15:07:39 | Updated at 2024-11-23 17:51:28
2 hours ago
When muscles work out, they help neurons grow: Biochemical and physical effects of exercise could help heal nerves
Medical Xpress / Massachusetts Institute of Technology / Advanced Healthcare Materials ^ | Nov. 12, 2024 | Jennifer Chu / Angel Bu et al
Posted on 11/23/2024 7:06:59 AM PST by ConservativeMind
There's no doubt that exercise does a body good. Regular activity not only strengthens muscles but can bolster our bones, blood vessels, and immune system.
Now, MIT engineers have found that exercise can also have benefits at the level of individual neurons. They observed that when muscles contract during exercise, they release a soup of biochemical signals called myokines.
In the presence of these muscle-generated signals, neurons grew four times further compared to neurons that were not exposed to myokines. These cellular-level experiments suggest that exercise can have a significant biochemical effect on nerve growth.
Surprisingly, the researchers also found that neurons respond not only to the biochemical signals of exercise but also to its physical impacts. The team observed that when neurons are repeatedly pulled back and forth, similarly to how muscles contract and expand during exercise, the neurons grow just as much as when they are exposed to a muscle's myokines.
"That's a good sign because it tells us both biochemical and physical effects of exercise are equally important," Raman says.
Now that the group has shown that exercising muscle can promote nerve growth at the cellular level, they plan to study how targeted muscle stimulation can be used to grow and heal damaged nerves, and restore mobility for people who are living with a neurodegenerative disease such as ALS.
(Excerpt) Read more at medicalxpress.com ...
TOPICS: Health/Medicine
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These were confirmed in a lab, but it does appear exercise can help neurons grow 4X further than without exercise. That is a huge benefit.
It helps via both chemical releases and the physical movement.
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2 posted on 11/23/2024 7:07:27 AM PST by ConservativeMind (Trump: Befuddling Democrats, Republicans, and the Media for the benefit of the US and all mankind.)
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