Add source Login
A Little-Known Part Of Your Brain Could Keep You Strong As You Age

A Little-Known Part Of Your Brain Could Keep You Strong As You Age

You might already know that grip strength has been linked to your health and even longevity, especially as you age. Professor Xiaoping Hu, senior author of a new study linking brain activity and strength preservation, explained that, “Grip strength is more than just muscle. “It’s a marker of how well your body and your brain are functioning as you get older.” And as a part of his research, published in Frontiers in Neuroscience , scientists looked at how the brain activity in older adults correlated to their grip strength. They found that a little-known part of the brain, the caudate, seemed to be unusually highly linked to grip strength. How does our brain relate to our grip strength? In this study, researchers conducted MRI scans on older participants as they completed fitness tests. They then compared the results of those fitness tests to the activity seen in a full map of the brain’s networks, described by the authors as the brain’s “functional connectome”. “It’s like mapping out all the phone lines in your brain and seeing which ones are linked to how hard you can squeeze,” the study’s first author Amin Ghaffari said. “And one of the clearest signals came from this network involving the caudate.” Other parts of the brain, like the tail of the hippocampus, also showed a link to grip strength, but this connection was weaker. What is the caudate? Stronger blood flow and connectivity in the caudate nucleus seemed to be strongly related to better grip strength. This area lies “deep inside the brain near the thalamus,” and seems to be involved with working memory, executive functioning, visual processing, association learning, motivation, and more. What might these findings mean? The researchers hope that their findings might eventually lead to earlier and better diagnosis of frailty (linked to an increased risk of dementia and even death ), and may even help to prevent it. “Just as you might strengthen muscles with exercise, we could envision ways to strengthen these neural connections through targeted interventions,” said Ghaffari. “We’re trying to understand ageing not as a single event, but as a process,” Professor Hu added. “And of course we hope, long term, that more specific and accurate predictions about how people will age can reduce the worst effects of ageing.” Related... A 'Key' Chemical In Dark Chocolate May Slow Ageing The Generous Act That Can Slow Brain Ageing Exercise May 'Train' Our Immune System Against Premature Ageing