A neuroimaging investigation of the association between aerobic fitness, hippocampal volume, and memory performance in preadolescent children

By L. Chaddock, Kirk I. Erickson, Ruchika Shaurya Prakash, Jennifer S. Kim, Michelle W. Voss, Matt Vanpatter, Matthew B. Pontifex, L. Raine, A. Konkel, Charles H. Hillman and 2 more. Brain Research, 2010

619 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Because children are becoming overweight, unhealthy, and unfit, understanding the neurocognitive benefits of an active lifestyle in childhood has important public health and educational implications. Animal research has indicated that aerobic exercise is related to increased cell proliferation and survival in the hippocampus as well as enhanced hippocampal-dependent learning and memory. Recent evidence extends this relationship to elderly humans by suggesting that high aerobic fitness levels in older adults are associated with increased hippocampal volume and superior memory performance. The present study aimed to further extend the link between fitness, hippocampal volume, and memory to a sample of preadolescent children. To this end, magnetic resonance imaging was employed to investigate whether higher- and lower-fit 9- and 10-year-old children showed differences in hippocampal volume and if the differences were related to performance on an item and relational memory task. Relational but not item memory is primarily supported by the hippocampus. Consistent with predictions, higher-fit children showed greater bilateral hippocampal volumes and superior relational memory task performance compared to lower-fit children. Hippocampal volume was also positively associated with performance on the relational but not the item memory task. Furthermore, bilateral hippocampal volume was found to mediate the relationship between fitness level (VO2 max) and relational memory. No relationship between aerobic fitness, nucleus accumbens volume, and memory was reported, which strengthens the hypothesized specific effect of fitness on the hippocampus. The findings are the first to indicate that aerobic fitness may relate to the structure and function of the preadolescent human brain.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3991fb988d7624665182c99f1ad08e38a43a2b17

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Citations in the corpus

Exercise as medicine – evidence for prescribing exercise as therapy in 26 different chronic diseases (2015, background): “…appears to decrease the severity of negative symptoms (Beebe et al., 2005; Acil et al., 2008; Gorczynski & Faulkner, 2010), reduce stress and anxiety (Fleshner, 2005), improve concentration and attention (Chaddock et al., 2010), and reduce depression severity (Laske et al., 2010) in schizophrenia.”
Physical Activity, Fitness, Cognitive Function, and Academic Achievement in Children: A Systematic Review. (2016, methodology): “(24) observed that hippocampal volume was greater in higher-fit children, and further, that hippocampal volume mediated the relationship between fitness and relational memory performance.”