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A study conducted by MIT engineers has found that exercise can have significant benefits for individual neurons in your brain.
They observed that when muscles contract during exercise, they release biochemical signals called myokines, proteins that act as messengers to influence other cells and organs. Neurons exposed to these proteins reacted by growing four times farther than neurons that were not.
Previous studies have indicated a potential biochemical link between muscle activity and nerve growth, but this latest study demonstrates how physical effects can be just as important.
The MIT team’s findings could influence exercise therapies that aim to repair damaged and deteriorating nerves.
“Now that we know this muscle-nerve crosstalk exists, it can be useful for treating things like nerve injury, where communication between nerve and muscle is cut off,” says Ritu Raman, PhD, the Eugene Bell Career Development Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.
“Maybe if we stimulate the muscle, we could encourage the nerve to heal, and restore mobility to those who have lost it due to traumatic injury or neurodegenerative diseases.”
In 2023, Raman and her team found a way to restore mobility in mice that had undergone a traumatic muscle injury by implanting muscle tissue at the site of injury, then stimulating the tissue with light to replicate exercise.
The results of the experiment showed that regular exercise stimulated the grafted muscle to produce certain biochemical signals that are known to promote nerve and blood vessel growth.
The new study aimed to determine whether exercising muscles has any direct effect on how nerves grow with respect to muscles and nerve tissue.
The team created mouse tissue that was trained to contract when exposed to light. This allowed them to flash a light repeatedly, causing the muscle to squeeze and ultimately mimic exercise.
The team then collected samples from the surrounding solution in which the muscle tissue was exercised with the assumption that it would hold myokines and even oher proteins as well.
“I would think of myokines as a biochemical soup of things that muscles secrete, some of which could be good for nerves and others that might have nothing to do with nerves,” Raman says. “Muscles are pretty much always secreting myokines, but when you exercise them, they make more.”
The myokine solution was then transferred to a dish containing motor neurons, grown from mice stem cells. Motor neurons are nerves found in the spinal cord that control muscles involved in voluntary movement.
Raman notes, “They grow much farther and faster, and the effect is pretty immediate.”
The team ran a genetic analysis in order to examine how the neurons changed in response to the exercise-induced myokines. They extracted RNA from the neurons to determine if there was any impact on certain neuronal genes.
These results proved that biochemical factors have an effect on neuron growth, but the researchers conducted a different experiment in an effort to determine if the purely physical impacts of exercise have any effect.
The researchers grew a different set of motor neurons on a gel mat that they embedded with tiny magnets. Using an external magnet, they jiggled the mat back and forth to “exercise” the neuron for thirty minutes a day.
The results of the studies could be generalized to show us that both the biochemical and the physical effects of exercise are important, according to Raman.
The MIT research team now plans to study how targeted muscle stimulation can be used to grow and heal damaged nerves and restore mobility for people with ALS disease.
The results were published in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.
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