International Graduate School of Neuroscience

Fit for purpose: the impact of physical activity on cognitive function in the rat

Thursday, April 3, 2014, 3 p.m., Seminar Room FNO - 01 / 117

• Aine Kelly
• Department of Physiology, Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institut, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

The cognitive-enhancing effects of exercise have been widely-investigated and are consistently correlated with increased expression of the neurotrophin brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in the hippocampus and with increased neurogenesis in this brain region. However, the mechanisms underlying these effects of exercise are not well understood and consequently, the therapeutic applicability of exercise regimens or the development of pharmacomimetics of exercise for improving and maintaining cognitive function has been limited. The magnitude of the exercise-induced effects and their persistence are likely to depend on the duration and intensity of exercise training. We have assessed the effects of exercise protocols of different durations on object recognition and object displacement memory in the rat. Our data indicate that single bouts of exercise are sufficient to enhance performance of these learning and memory tasks and that these improvements are concomitant with activation of BDNF-stimulated signalling pathways. Moreover, these changes are mimicked by intracerebroventricular or intravenous administration of BDNF. The effects also appear to be linked with task acquisition rather than consolidation or recall. In contrast, the longer-term effects of exercise may enhance learning in a neurogenesis-dependent manner that may also require increased expression of BDNF.In this seminar, I will describe our recent investigations of how exercise enhances object recognition and displacement learning in a time-dependent manner that involves cellular and molecular pathways stimulated by BDNF.

Host

• Denise Manahan-Vaughan
  Department of Neurophysiology, Faculty of Medicine, Ruhr-University Bochum