14 DAY TRIAL // In a first-of-its-kind study, scientists at the University of Southern California (USC), working together with colleagues from Sweden, managed to draw amazing correlations between cardiovascular health levels in teenage boys and the likelihood that these individuals would accomplish something later in life. The investigation showed that the young boys who were more fit and in a better overall shape tended to be a lot more intelligent than their more corpulent peers, as evidenced by the answers they gave to a number of intelligence tests.
The work also revealed that the fit young men tended to be able to do much better later on in life as well, getting more education and benefiting from higher paid jobs than their former peers. “During early adolescence and adulthood, the central nervous system displays considerable plasticity. Yet, the effect of exercise on cognition remains poorly understood,” USC expert and College of Letters, Arts & Sciences Research Professor of Psychology Nancy Pedersen explains. She has been one of the leaders for the new research, which appears in detail in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The new investigation relies on a flow of data collected on over 1.2 million Swedish men, who all enlisted in the mandatory military service at the age of 18. All of the test subjects were born between 1950 and 1976, the researchers say. The science group looked for a wide variety of factors to analyze, including verbal ability, logical performance, geometric perception, and mechanical skills, among many others. “Positive associations with intelligence scores were restricted to cardiovascular fitness, not muscular strength, supporting the notion that aerobic exercise improved cognition through the circulatory system influencing brain plasticity,” Pedersen says.
“Direct causality cannot be established. However, the fact that we demonstrated associations between cognition and cardiovascular fitness but not muscle strength […] and the longitudinal prediction by cardiovascular fitness on subsequent academic achievement, speak in favor of a cardiovascular effect on brain function. The results provide scientific support for educational policies to maintain or increase physical education in school curricula. Physical exercise should be an important instrument for public health initiatives to optimize cognitive performance, as well as disease prevention at the society level,” the expert adds.