Tuesday, 11 December 2018
Pedal Your Way To Healthy Aging!
The evidence of the benefits of physical activity for both the body and the brain continues to pile up. A study published by Pollock et al. in April 2018 dealt with a group of 125 male and female cyclists ages 55 to 79, a stage of life when normally our muscle fibres becomes less vascularized and our immune systems decline. But Pollock found that some of his subjects, at age 75, had the immune profiles of 20-year-olds!
As described in a summary of this study published in the French newspaper Le Monde, these cyclists (two-thirds of whom were men) had all been cycling for many years, still cycled 2.5 hours per week (at moderate but constant intensity) and could cycle 100 kilometres in 6.5 hours. None of them smoked, drank much alcohol or had high blood pressure. The researchers compared this group of cyclists with two other groups of adults who were in good health but not physically active: one group about the same age as these cyclists, the other consisting of young adults, ages 20 to 36. The cyclists were found to have not only muscle vascularization comparable to that of the young adults, but also amazingly healthy thymus glands, producing as many immune cells as those of the younger group.
When you think of all the pathologies that are triggered or aggravated by a decline in the immune system with age (ranging from rheumatoid polyarthritis to cancer), you’ll agree with the quip by one of the study’s co-authors that if cycling were a pill, everybody wold buy it, and the drug company that produced it would make a fortune! But tough luck for Big Pharma: cycling is an activity that is free and accessible to everyone!
Body Movement and the Brain | No comments
