It is widely accepted that aging is accompanied by remodelling of the immune system including thymic atrophy and increased frequency of senescent T cells, leading to immune compromise. However, physical activity, which influences immunity but declines dramatically with age, is not considered in this literature. We…
People who got some exercise, but not enough to meet the physical activity recommendations were still 20 percent less likely to die over a 14-year period than those who did not do any physical activity. (The recommendations say to do 150 minutes of moderate activity per week or 75 minutes of vigorous activity per…
Methods: A population sample of 4,512 (1,945 men) Scottish Health Survey 2003 respondents (35 years) were followed up to 2007 for all-cause mortality and CVD events (fatal and nonfatal combined). Main exposures were interviewer-assessed screen time (<2 h/day; 2 to <4 h/day; and 4 h/day) and moderate to vigorous…
• Motor neurons die, particularly from age 60 onward. This causes connections between muscle fibers to wither — and that, in turn, eventually leads to loss and shrinking of muscle fibers. As a result, muscles get smaller and a person gets weaker, says Sandra Hunter, an associate professor of exercise science at…
This rise in pediatric obesity is painful to hear in the brain science community, especially because we know so much about the relationship between physical activity and mental acuity. Exercise—especially aerobic exercise—is fanastic for the brain, increasing executive function scores anywhere from 50 percent to 100…
In fact, some evolutionary biologists believe this is why morning sickness still persists in human pregnancies. Morning sickness, which can last the entire day (and, for some women, the entire pregnancy), makes a woman stick to a bland, boring diet—if she eats much at all. This avoidance strategy would have kept our…
As we learn more about maternal hormones and their influence on the developing brain, scientists are beginning to propose actual biological mechanisms for the kind of folk prophecies that have been around for ages. One recent study, for instance, suggests that a child's shyness is determined, in part, by maternal…