Regular exercise speeds learning and improves blood flow to the brain, according to a new study led by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine.

The study, published in the Neuroscience medical journal, is the first to examine the relationship between exercise and the brain in a non-human primate model.

“There is ample evidence of the beneficial effects of exercise on cognition in other animal models, such as the rat, but it has been unclear whether the same holds true for people”, said senior author Judy L. Cameron, PhD, a psychiatry professor. She argues that testing the hypothesis in monkeys can provide information that is more comparable to human physiology.

For the study, the researchers trained adult female cynomolgus monkeys to run on a human-sized treadmill at 80 per cent of their individual maximal aerobic capacity for one hour each day, five days per week, for five months.

Another group of monkeys remained sedentary, meaning they sat on the immobile treadmill, for a comparable time. Half of the runners went through a three-month sedentary period after the exercise period. In all groups, half of the monkeys were middle aged (10 to 12 years old) and the others were more mature (15 to 17 years old). Initially, the middle-aged monkeys were in better shape than their older counterparts, but with exercise, all the runners became more fit.

During the fifth week of exercise training, standardised cognitive testing was initiated and then performed five days per week until week 24. In a preliminary task, the monkeys learned that by lifting a cover off a small well in the testing tray, they could have the food reward that lay within it. In a spatial delay task, a researcher placed a food reward in one of two wells and covered both wells in full view of the monkey.

A screen was lowered to block the animal’s view for a second, and then raised again. If the monkey displaced the correct cover, she got the treat. After reliably succeeding at this task, monkeys that correctly moved the designated one of two different objects placed over side-by-side wells got the food reward that lay within it.

However, she noted that later in the testing period, learning rate and performance was similar among the groups, which could mean that practice at the task will eventually overshadow the impact of exercise on cognitive function.

When the researchers examined tissue samples from the brain’s motor cortex, they found that mature monkeys that ran had greater vascular volume than middle-aged runners or sedentary animals. But those blood flow changes reversed in monkeys that were sedentary after exercising for five months.

“These findings indicate that aerobic exercise at the recommended levels can have meaningful, beneficial effects on the brain,” Dr. Cameron said. “It supports the notion that working out is good for people in many, many ways.”