Nature: Doing exercise reduces brain inflammation and becomes smarter?

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Nature: Doing exercise reduces brain inflammation and becomes smarter?

Scientists have discovered that clumping proteins produced in the blood of mice after exercise can improve the cognitive level of non-exercise mice and reduce brain inflammation丨Science Discovery

We believe everyone can tell a lot about the many benefits of sports. Weight loss requires exercise, fitness requires exercise, strengthening immunity requires exercise, and protecting the heart and liver can also be related to exercise…

Even in solving the problem of neurological diseases, exercise can also help.

Recently, Professor Tony Wyss-Coray from Stanford University and his research team took their latest results to the top of “Nature”.

They found that injecting the “exercise plasma” of exercise mice into ordinary mice of the same age can improve the mice’s cognition and reverse the abnormal expression of neuroinflammatory mice .

Among them, clump protein (CLU), which plays a key role, has also been confirmed to exist in the blood of cognitive impairment patients who insist on exercise, suggesting that exercise anti-inflammatory molecules may be widespread, and it is expected to develop new methods for the treatment of neuroinflammation and cognitive impairment.

Let’s say that life lies in sports, and the Chinese don’t lie to the Chinese!

Screenshot of the paper’s homepage

The positive effects of exercise on the brain have been confirmed in many mouse experiments and clinical follow-ups, but unfortunately, we still know very little about the mechanism.

Scientists suspect that exercise secretes some “signals”, which are transmitted to all parts of the body through the blood, and “transmit information” to the brain, ultimately achieving the effect of improving cognition.

When it comes to cognitive function, one has to talk about neurodegenerative diseases and neuroinflammation.

Professor Tony Wyss-Coray, who has been immersed in these decades, said that neuroinflammation and human neurodegenerative diseases are closely related, and reversing or reducing neuroinflammation can have a positive impact on cognitive function .

From this point of view, it is quite logical that exercise improves cognition.

This time, Professor Tony Wyss-Coray and his research team tried to find the key factors in the blood, and even wanted to transfer the positive effects of exercise to non-exercise individuals through “transfusion”.

Of course, they succeeded.

Of course, the power of mice was used at the beginning of the experiment. Researchers have prepared some cages with rollers that allow mice to exercise 4-6 miles a day without leaving the cage.

The rollers in some of the cages are locked, and the residents inside are forced to become “lazy” mice.

The mice in the control group lived in standard cages. Every 3 days, the researchers injected the plasma of the exercise group and lazy group mice into the control group through the retroorbital vein .

“Transfusion” injection of mice

The mice lived in this way for 28 days. At this time, the overall survival rate of cells in the exercise group was higher, and the numbers of neurons, neural stem cells and progenitor cells, and astrocytes were higher than those in the lazy group.

The mice in the control group that received plasma injections also had similar changes .

The number of neural stem cells and progenitor cells of the recipient mice in the exercise group’s plasma was almost twice that of the recipient mice in the lazy group, and they performed better in learning and memory tests.

In order to clarify the molecular mechanism, the researchers compared the hippocampal transcriptomes of the two groups of recipient mice and found 1952 genes with significant expression differences.

Among them, the most significant 250 genes are related to the down-regulation of the inflammatory response. In other words, the plasma of mice in the exercise group can induce a reduction in exercise-related neuroinflammation .

“The runner’s blood has an impact on the brain!” Professor Ony Wyss-Coray, who held the results of the experiment, was full of confidence.

Research on the plasma of mice in the exercise group will begin immediately.

The researchers found 235 different proteins in the lazy group of mice, and confirmed that several of them are related to the complement cascade.

Professor Tony Wyss-Coray pointed out that chronic inflammation caused by abnormal activation of the complement system may accelerate the progression of neurodegenerative diseases.

There is nothing wrong in this direction, continue to study.

The researchers found that when the clumping protein in the plasma was removed, the anti-inflammatory effect produced by the plasma of the exercise group mice also disappeared .

The fluorescently labeled cluster protein was injected into inflammation model mice and found that they appeared in the hippocampal brain endothelial cells of the mice.

CLU reverses abnormal gene expression in neuroinflammatory mice

In mouse models of acute and chronic neuroinflammation, the mice have already developed features of neurodegenerative diseases such as amyloid precipitation and microglial proliferation.

And to mice injected with clusterin inflammation, reversible inflammation-related abnormal gene expression .

The researchers tested the clumping protein level of 20 patients with mild cognitive impairment, which was consistent with the results of the mouse experiment. After 6 months of aerobic exercise, the clumping protein level of the patients increased significantly .

In short, the results of the study preliminarily proved the correctness of the conjecture of Professor Tony Wyss-Coray and the research team.

The increase in plexiprotein induced by exercise can help reduce neuroinflammation in mice and provide a way for the development of treatments for neuroinflammation or cognitive impairment. New ideas.

But I still want to remind everyone that exercise belongs to exercise, and “exchange blood” only exists in the experiment for the time being, don’t be impulsive!

References:

[1] https://neurosciencenews.com/exercise-blood-cognition-19776/

[2] Zurine De M, Nathalie K, Michael JB, et al. Exercise plasma boosts memory and dampens brain inflammation via clusterin[J]. Nature, 2021. DOI:10.1038/s41586-021-04183-x