Abstract
Increasing attention has been given to understanding resilience to brain diseases, often described as brain or cognitive reserve. Among the protective factors for the development of resilience, physical activity/exercise has been considered to play an important role. Exercise is known to induce many positive effects on the brain. As such, exercise represents an important tool to influence neurodevelopment and shape the adult brain to react to life's challenges. Among many beneficial effects, exercise intervention has been associated with cognitive improvement and stress resilience in humans and animal models. Thus, a growing number of studies have demonstrated that exercise not only recovers or minimizes cognitive deficits by inducing better neuroplasticity and cognitive reserve but also counteracts brain pathology. This is evidenced before disease onset or after it has been established. In this review, we aimed to present encouraging data from current clinical and pre-clinical neuroscience research and discuss the possible biological mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of physical exercise on resilience. We consider the implication of physical exercise for resilience from brain development to aging and for some neurological diseases. Overall, the literature indicates that brain/cognitive reserve built up by regular exercise in several stages of life, prepares the brain to be more resilient to cognitive impairment and consequently to brain pathology.
Highlights
Stressful life events can have a considerable impact on brain function and structure, resulting in the development of several psychiatric disorders (Ludwig et al, 2018; Chow and Choi, 2019)
To conduct a scoping review looking at all life stages and some neurological conditions, both clinical and pre-clinical research, we included 114 more studies through a free search on pregnancy (n = 9), childhood and adolescence (n = 18), adulthood and aging (n = 16), Alzheimer’s disease (n = 17), Parkinson’s disease (n = 14), Epilepsy (n = 20), Stroke (n = 16), systematic reviews (n = 3), and clinical guidelines (n = 1)
Conditions other than a stressful early life may influence cognitive reserve in later life, such as nutritional status during childhood (Zhang et al, 2010) and education (Zahodne et al, 2015). These findings suggest that the cognitive reserve built up in physically fit subjects in the early stages of life prepare the brain to be more resilient to cognitive impairment, dementia, and Alzheimer’s pathology; this probably occurs through brain plasticity
Summary
Stressful life events can have a considerable impact on brain function and structure, resulting in the development of several psychiatric disorders (Ludwig et al, 2018; Chow and Choi, 2019). Resilience is defined as the capacity to adapt successfully to acute stress, trauma, or chronic adversity (Russo et al, 2012). In this context, researchers have introduced the concept of brain resilience, often described as brain reserve or cognitive reserve (Medaglia et al, 2017). Reserve of either type expresses alteration in the function or structure of the brain that modifies cognitive and behavioral capacities following brain damage (for review, see Medaglia et al, 2017). Some key brain structures involved in specific generation and regulation of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses to stressors include insula, nucleus accumbens, amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus, medial prefrontal, and
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