Exercise Helps Protect Brain of Multiple Sclerosis Patients, Study Suggests

In addition, MRI scans of the patients showed that the fitter MS patients showed less damage in parts of the brain that show deterioration as a result of MS, as well as a greater volume of vital gray matter.

"We found that aerobic fitness has a protective effect on parts of the brain that are most affected by multiple sclerosis," said Ruchika Shaurya Prakash, lead author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

"As a result, these fitter patients actually show better performance on tasks that measure processing speed."

The study, done with colleagues Robert Motl and Arthur Kramer of the University of Illinois and Erin Snook of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, appears online in the journal Brain Research and will be published in a future print edition.

The study involved 21 women diagnosed with relapsing-remitting MS. They were compared with 15 age- and education-matched healthy female controls. The study assessed fitness, cognitive function, and structural changes in all participants.

In order to measure fitness levels, the participants underwent a VO2 max test, in which they rode a stationary bicycle until they felt exhausted. During the test, they breathed into a mask which measured their oxygen consumption.

All the women also took a variety of tests designed to evaluate cognitive functions, such as processing speed and selective attention. In one test, for example, participants had to write down in one minute as many words as they could think of that began with the letter "F." MS patients generally perform poorly on these tests compared to healthy people.

The third analysis involved MRIs of the participants, revealing any damage to their brains.

As expected, the MS patients did much worse than the healthy controls on the tests of brain functioning, and showed more deterioration in their brains as revealed through the MRIs.

But what was interesting, Prakash said, was the significant differences between the more aerobically fit MS patients and those who were less fit.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100218141813.htm

This article was specifically appealing to me because Multiple Sclerosis was my student lecture disease last semester. I found it interesting that daily exercise can influence physiology of the brain. Though it is apparent that exercise helps the mind, I was not aware that it played a factor in physical aspects as well, for MS is when the myelin sheath of neuron deteriorates.