Brain Benefits of Exercise can be Gained with a Single Protein

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The new study, published July 9, 2020 in Science, showed that after mice exercise, their livers secrete a protein called Gpld1 into the blood. Levels of this protein in the blood correspond to improved cognitive function in aged mice, and a collaboration with the UCSF Memory and Aging Center found that the enzyme is also elevated in the blood of elderly humans who exercise regularly. But the researchers showed that simply increasing the amount of Gpld1 produced by the mouse liver could confer many of the same brain benefits as regular exercise.

[...] Villeda lab graduate student Alana Horowitz and postdoctoral researcher Xuelai Fan, PhD, [pursued] blood-borne factors that might also confer the benefits of exercise, which is also known to rejuvenate the aging brain in a similar fashion to what was seen in the lab's "young blood" experiments.

Horowitz and Fan took blood from aged mice who had exercised regularly for seven weeks and administered it to sedentary aged mice. They found that four weeks of this treatment produced dramatic improvements in learning and memory in the older mice, similar to what was seen in the mice who had exercised regularly. When they examined the animals' brains, they found evidence of enhanced production of new neurons in the region known as the hippocampus, a well-documented proxy for the rejuvenating benefits of exercise.

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