There are several studies that show adult neurogenesis from aerobic exercise, particularly running, in rats and mice.
Example:
Physical exercise increases adult hippocampal neurogenesis in male rats provided it is aerobic and sustained.
https:/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26844666
There is at least one study that allows us to infer that the same effects may occur in humans (quoted below).
Please let us know if there are more studies like this. It looks like a very practical approach to improve your cognition and prevent dementia with little risk.
"Columbia neuroscientist Scott Small and colleagues appear to have found a way around this problem. First, they put mice that had been running voluntarily for two weeks into a magnetic resonance imager to map exercise-induced changes in cerebral blood volume, a measure of increased blood vessel formation in the dentate gyrus. Then, by sacrificing the animals and counting new neurons, they were able to correlate the neuronal proliferation they observed with changes in blood volume.
The researchers then conducted magnetic resonance tests on a small group of middle-aged people who had been exercising about an hour a day, four times a week, for three months. By charting exercise-induced changes in cerebral blood volume in the human hippocampal region and applying the same algorithms used in the mice, they were able to deduce that neurogenesis was also occurring in the humans. Changes in blood volume in the dentate gyrus, they concluded, provide a correlate of neurogenesis in humans."
Anecdotal, yet may not be completely coincidental: Alan Turing was an avid marathon runner. This is not part of the argument--so please don't take it into account when responding. ;)
That first study does not support your claim. This is the main chart: https://i.imgur.com/pTFJkaJ.png. Note how it shows a significant response in Doublecortin+ cells only in the HRT group and not for the LRTs. These acronyms stand "for low (LRT) and high (HRT) response to aerobic exercise training". In particular, quoting from the article:
Starting with a founder population of genetically heterogeneous rats (N/NIH stock), we applied two-way artificial selection based on the magnitude of change in running capacity after completing 8 weeks of standardized aerobic treadmill training. After 15 generations of selection, rats bred as HRT increased maximal treadmill running distance from 646 to 869 m (change, 223 ± 20 m), whereas rats bred as LRT decreased from 620 to 555 m (change, −65 ± 15 m) after completing the same absolute amount of training (Koch et al. 2013).
This is a huge confounding variable. There is a very good chance these cells have an impact on these rats' ability to run long distances after training, so it's completely reasonable to expect that the cell growth would respond well to the very exercise the rats were selected for responding well to! It does not show that the same effect would happen in a normal rat (the LRT rats did not see a difference in this particular cell growth, but they were also nonrandom).
Your point regarding the first study I cited seems to be a good one. There are a number of other studies with similar effects, however; some of which can be found in the review article.
Example: Physical exercise increases adult hippocampal neurogenesis in male rats provided it is aerobic and sustained. https:/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26844666
A review article here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5566493_Neurogenesi...
There is at least one study that allows us to infer that the same effects may occur in humans (quoted below).
Please let us know if there are more studies like this. It looks like a very practical approach to improve your cognition and prevent dementia with little risk.
From: http://www.dana.org/Publications/Brainwork/Details.aspx?id=4...
"Columbia neuroscientist Scott Small and colleagues appear to have found a way around this problem. First, they put mice that had been running voluntarily for two weeks into a magnetic resonance imager to map exercise-induced changes in cerebral blood volume, a measure of increased blood vessel formation in the dentate gyrus. Then, by sacrificing the animals and counting new neurons, they were able to correlate the neuronal proliferation they observed with changes in blood volume.
The researchers then conducted magnetic resonance tests on a small group of middle-aged people who had been exercising about an hour a day, four times a week, for three months. By charting exercise-induced changes in cerebral blood volume in the human hippocampal region and applying the same algorithms used in the mice, they were able to deduce that neurogenesis was also occurring in the humans. Changes in blood volume in the dentate gyrus, they concluded, provide a correlate of neurogenesis in humans."
Anecdotal, yet may not be completely coincidental: Alan Turing was an avid marathon runner. This is not part of the argument--so please don't take it into account when responding. ;)