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Summary Researcher finds an association between fitness of 9- and 10-year-old children and their brains.
Fitter kids tend to have a bigger hippocampus and perform better on a test of memory.According to study of University of Illinois, it included 49 kids and used magnetic resonance imaging to measure the relative size of specific structures in the brains. The study focused on the hippocampus, a structure tucked deep in the brain, because it is known to be important in learning and memory.“This is the first study I know of that has used MRI measures to look at differences in brain between kids who are fit and kids who aren’t fit,” said University of Illinois psychology professor Art Kramer, who led the study “Beyond that, it relates those measures of brain structure to cognition.”Researchers found that the physically fit children tended to have bigger hippocampal volume – about 12 percent bigger relative to total brain size – than their out-of-shape peers.The researchers measured how efficiently the subjects used oxygen while running on a treadmill to measure fitness. “This is the gold standard measure of fitness,” Chaddock said.Further analyses indicated that a bigger hippocampus boosted performance on the relational memory task.“If you remove hippocampal volume from the equation,” Chaddock said, “the relationship between fitness and memory decreases.”“If you get some lousy genes from your parents, you can’t really fix that, and it’s not easy to do something about your economic status. But here’s something that we can do something about,” Kramer said.
