Physical exercise enhances cognitive flexibility as well as astrocytic and synaptic markers in the medial prefrontal cortex
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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.
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Physical exercise increases new neuron production and improves behaviors associated with the hippocampus, also stimulates astrocyte growth and reduced microglial reactivity.
“Physical exercise, which increases new neuron production and improves behaviors associated with the hippocampus, also stimulates astrocyte growth (Brockett et al., 2015; Fahimi et al., 2017) and reduced microglial reactivity (Kohman et al., 2012, 2013).”
From Adult neurogenesis, glia, and the extracellular matrix (2019) · cites this paper as Brockett et al., 2015
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- Authors
- Brockett, A. T., LaMarca, E. A., & Gould, E.
- Affiliations
- Princeton University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Gould, Elizabeth
- Venue
- PLoS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2015-05-04
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- e0124859
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4418599
- OpenAlex
- W1601934261
- Cited by
- 142
- References
- 36
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 15 · 2019: 17 · 2018: 17 · 2017: 19 · 2016: 12 · 2015: 2
- FWCI
- 6.76
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health
- National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R21NS087460)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Developmental Neuroscience › Neurogenesis and neuroplasticity mechanisms
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience › Neuroscience and Neuropharmacology Research
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory and Neural Mechanisms
- Keywords
- physical activity, running, cognitive flexibility, medial prefrontal cortex, astrocytes, synaptic plasticity, dendritic plasticity, perirhinal cortex
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Astrocytes, Cognition, Male, Memory, Motor Activity, Physical Conditioning, Animal, Synapses, Biomarkers, Rats, Sprague-Dawley, Prefrontal Cortex, Dendritic Spines, Aquaporin 4
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