Brockett Adam T, LaMarca Elizabeth A, Gould Elizabeth
Department of Psychology and Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2015 May 4;10(5):e0124859. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0124859. eCollection 2015.
Physical exercise enhances a wide range of cognitive functions in humans. Running-induced cognitive enhancement has also been demonstrated in rodents but with a strong emphasis on tasks that require the hippocampus. Additionally, studies designed to identify mechanisms that underlie cognitive enhancement with physical exercise have focused on running-induced changes in neurons with little attention paid to such changes in astrocytes. To further our understanding of how the brain changes with physical exercise, we investigated whether running alters performance on cognitive tasks that require the prefrontal cortex and whether any such changes are associated with astrocytic, as well as neuronal, plasticity. We found that running enhances performance on cognitive tasks known to rely on the prefrontal cortex. By contrast, we found no such improvement on a cognitive task known to rely on the perirhinal cortex. Moreover, we found that running enhances synaptic, dendritic and astrocytic measures in several brain regions involved in cognition but that changes in the latter measures were more specific to brain regions associated with cognitive improvements. These findings suggest that physical exercise induces widespread plasticity in both neuronal and nonneuronal elements and that both types of changes may be involved in running-induced cognitive enhancement.
体育锻炼可增强人类多种认知功能。在啮齿动物中也证实了跑步能带来认知能力的提升，但重点主要在于需要海马体参与的任务。此外，旨在确定体育锻炼促进认知能力提升背后机制的研究，主要聚焦于跑步引起的神经元变化，而对星形胶质细胞的此类变化关注较少。为了进一步了解大脑如何因体育锻炼而发生变化，我们研究了跑步是否会改变需要前额叶皮质参与的认知任务的表现，以及此类变化是否与星形胶质细胞和神经元的可塑性有关。我们发现，跑步能提高已知依赖前额叶皮质的认知任务的表现。相比之下，我们发现对于已知依赖嗅周皮质的认知任务，跑步并没有带来这样的改善。此外，我们发现跑步能增强多个参与认知的脑区的突触、树突和星形胶质细胞相关指标，但后一类指标的变化在与认知改善相关的脑区中更为特异。这些发现表明，体育锻炼会在神经元和非神经元成分中诱导广泛的可塑性，且这两种类型的变化可能都参与了跑步引起的认知增强。
