Teen Girls Who Exercise Everyday Exhibit Better Attention Spans

 A natural ADHD cure?
Teen girls who exercise every day exhibit better attention spans — even without using drugs like Adderall.

• Researchers looked at data from 418 participants, including 211 females 15-18
• They found that girls who had exercised less took longer on tests for attention
• The US is still suffering shortages of ADHD drugs due to over-prescription issues

By CAITLIN TILLEY, HEALTH REPORTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM  February 17, 2023

Teen girls who exercise each day have better attention spans than their peers, a study suggests.

A University of Illinois research team found that girls who exercised less were slower and less accurate on tests that involved ignoring distracting information.
More blood flows to the brain during and after exercise - boosting executive functioning, which includes a person's attention span.

Diagnosis of behavioral issues is rife among American teens, but getting your kids off their phones and playing outside might do the trick instead of medication.
ADHD drug sales rocketed during the pandemic when many were forced to spend hours inside thanks to lockdowns, which caused ongoing Adderall shortages.

 Some 211 females aged between 15 and 18 wore accelerometers on their wrist for seven days for the study, to calculate the intensity of their physical activity

 Prescriptions for Adderall doubled in the US during the pandemic, due to a relaxing of prescription rules to keep people at home in lockdowns
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a chronic condition including attention difficulty, hyperactivity and impulsiveness.

The disorder is far less likely to be diagnosed in girls compared to boys, and some women do not receive a diagnosis until adulthood. 
ADHD prevalence varies greatly between the UK and US, posing questions as to whether rates are as high as diagnoses claim. 

Between 2016 and 2019, 13 percent of US children aged 12-17 were diagnosed with ADHD. 
In comparable nations like the UK, ADHD rates are much lower — around 4 percent of boys and 1 percent of girls. 

This is combined with the more sedentary lifestyles lived by American children, which also caused the obesity crisis.

Many minors with ADHD have other conditions, including learning disorders, anxiety and depression.
Adderall is the most popular ADHD drug. Prescriptions spiked to 4.1 million in 2021, a 10 percent increase on the previous year.

 But Illinois researchers may have found a more natural way to control your child's attention span.
The researchers used data from a previous trial of high school students in New South Wales, Australia, looking at differences between gender in terms of physical activity and cognition.
They used data from 418 participants, including 211 females aged between 15 and 18, who wore accelerometers on their wrist for seven days.

The device measures changes in acceleration, which researchers used to calculate the intensity of their physical activity. Participants also took part in cognitive tasks on a computer to test their attention control and working memory, including tests that required them to ignore distracting information.

One task involved looking at a black background with three white arrows and pressing P on their keyboard if the middle arrow was pointing right and pressing Q if it was facing the left.
Participants' response times were recorded. 
The researchers found that the girls who had done less exercise over the course of the day took longer and were less accurate on the tests.

The associations were 'small-to-moderate', said study leader Dominika Pindus, professor of kinesiology and community health at the University of Illinois, but still important.

The results need to be investigated further in random controlled trials, she added.
The findings were published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports.
Previous studies found that better attention control is linked to improved academic performance, as well as 'having better finances, having better health and less chances of being convicted of a crime', Ms Pindus said.

Other research has suggested that high calorie diets may lead to memory impairment, and increased cardiovascular risks in obese children could be linked to lower academic performance.

Exercise has a whole host of brain-boosting benefits. It can increase the thickness of your cerebral cortex and also encourages the brain's ability to generate new neural connections, known as neuroplasticity, which can avoid cognitive issues further down the line.

Your Grip Strength Shows How Well You Are Aging

Grip strength is closely linked to mortality in people of all incomes,
and may be a better indicator of life expectancy than blood pressure.

By Gretchen Reynolds Washington Post

January 18, 2023 

Want to know how well you’re aging? Check your grip strength.

A recent study of 1,275 men and women found that those with relatively feeble handgrip strength, a reliable marker of overall muscle quality and strength, showed signs of accelerated aging of their DNA.
Their genes appeared to be growing old faster than those of people with greater strength.

The study, although preliminary, raises the possibility that visiting the gym or doing a few push-ups in our living rooms might help turn back the clock and make our cells and selves more biologically youthful, whatever our current age.

Why grip strength matters

A wealth of research already tells us that strength is good for us. People who lift weights are substantially less likely to develop heart disease, high blood pressure, and many other chronic illnesses than those who skip resistance exercise

Strength also can be an augury of how long we’ll live. In a 2015 study of almost 140,000 adults in high-, middle- and low-income nations, reduced handgrip strength was closely linked to mortality in people of all incomes, predicting risks for early death better than blood pressure, which is often considered one of the best indicators of life span.

“Grip strength is a simple but powerful predictor of future disability, morbidity, and mortality,” the authors of an accompanying editorial concluded, its effects holding true “not only in older people but also in middle-aged and young people.”

How, though, might a sturdy grip today influence our well-being tomorrow?

“Grip strength is often called a biomarker of aging,” said Mark Peterson, an associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who led the new study. “But the biological context for why it’s so predictive of positive and negative outcomes during aging hasn’t really been clear.”

Maybe, Dr. Peterson and his colleagues speculated, epigenetics might be key.

Grip strength measurer

What is your epigenetic age?

Epigenetics involves changes to the numbers and actions of certain tiny molecules that attach like mollusks to the outer surface of a gene and affect how and when that gene turns on. Epigenetic changes occur in response to our diets, exercise habits, and many other aspects of our lives, and affect our DNA and health.

Epigenetics also may signal how rapidly we are aging, recent science shows.

About a decade ago, researchers began analyzing huge data sets of people’s epigenomes, which are the epigenetic changes unique to each of us, and using that data to develop what are called “epigenetic clocks” that estimate our biological age.

Chronological age is, of course, how old we are, according to our birth certificates. Biological age indicates the functional age and health of our cells and bodies. The two numbers can differ substantially.

Epigenetic clocks use algorithms to assess biological age, based on the various patterns of molecules on genes. If the clock suggests your biological age exceeds your chronological one, you’re aging faster than normal and, to be blunt, approaching frailty and death at a speedier clip than someone whose biological age is lower.

The relationship between grip strength and aging

Aware of the latest epigenetic clock research, Peterson and his colleagues wondered whether strength might be linked to epigenetic age, for better or worse.

They began gathering records for 1,275 participants of an ongoing study of aging who had already given blood and used a squeezable device called a hand dynamometer to measure their grip strength.

The researchers then determined everyone’s approximate epigenetic age from their blood cells, using three different clocks. (Multiple labs have developed proprietary epigenetic clocks, which vary slightly.) They also checked death records for up to 10 years after people joined the study and, finally, cross-tabulated this data against people’s grip strength.

They found that, in general, the weaker someone’s grip strength was, the higher his or her epigenetic age. Their DNA appeared less youthful than that of their stronger contemporaries, leaving them potentially more vulnerable to earlier illness or death.

“Overall, this study lends further support to the association of epigenetic age with frailty,” said Guillaume Paré, a professor and director of the Genetic and Molecular Epidemiology Laboratory at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Paré has studied epigenetics but was not involved in the new study.

Another reason to get stronger?

The study raises new issues, though.

“A key question that remains to be addressed is the causality of these associations,” Paré said.

Although the study shows that people with punier muscles are also people with elevated epigenetic age, it can’t prove that weakness directly caused anyone’s accelerated aging. Other factors might be at play, such as income, diet, medical history or other aspects of someone’s lifestyle.

But even with its limitations, the study’s results are provocative, Peterson said, suggesting that our muscular oomph — or its opposite — may influence our epigenomes and, in the process, how fast and well we age.

If you wonder about your current strength, many gyms have hand dynamometers you can use to test your grip. You then can look up typical handgrip strength measurements by age and gender in this 2018 study (see Table 1 in the study for details).

The numbers suggest a typical 40-year-old man weighing 198 pounds is likely to have a handgrip strength of around 103 pounds (47 kilograms), while a woman of the same age weighing 167 pounds has a typical grip strength of around 66 pounds (30 kilograms).

If your results show your grip is on the weaker side, you don’t need to focus just on your hands. You can strengthen your grip by getting stronger, in general.

In fact, most of us don’t need to parse our precise grip strength to realize we could benefit from more strength training. “The usual exercise pyramids, showing how much exercise you need, put strength training at the top,” Peterson said, “as if it’s the part you need the least of. But strength should be at the bottom, I think, at the base. It’s foundational to health.”

So use that gym membership you bought this month. Get a dumbbell to keep at your desk. Try some body weight training or finish a burpee or three. You might wind up altering the age of your epigenome, as well as the brawn of your biceps.

Do you have a fitness question? Email YourMove@washpost.com and we may answer your question in a future column.

How exercise can help you build resilience at any age

 How exercise can help you build resilience at any age

Intentionally stressing our bodies through exercise can make us more resilient to a variety of stressors

By Kelyn Soong,  Washington Post

February 3, 2023 at 2:28 p.m. EST

 

Stress surrounds us every day in subtle and substantial ways. Although we can’t eliminate stress from daily life, research shows that by intentionally stressing our bodies through exercise, we can change how we respond to stress and boost our resilience.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity — a career setback, a relationship breakup or any of the big and small disappointments of daily life — and grow from the experience so that we handle difficult situations even better the next time. Much of the research on resilience focuses on building the skill in childhood, but resilience can be strengthened at any age.

Resilience is essentially an emotional muscle, but a growing body of research shows that stressing our physical muscles by exercise is one way to increase our capacity to cope with daily stress.

Three times a week for eight weeks, the exercising volunteers pedaled, jogged or stair-climbed at a gym, their workouts focusing on prolonged, moderate intensity sessions on some days and shorter, high-intensity intervals on others. Intensity was based on heart rate relative to each person. The sessions progressively lengthened, from 30 minutes at the start of the study to 50 minutes by the end.

The goal of the study was to test whether regular exercise improved the individual’s response to stress, so the researchers had to come up with a way to re-create stress. They settled on a physiological stressor, inflating a blood pressure cuff to restrict blood flow in the forearm, which is considered a mild stressor mimicking what happens during a heart attack. Blood tests measuring the oxidative stress response followed.

At the end of the study, not surprisingly, the exercisers had improved their fitness, including a 15 percent gain, on average, in their aerobic capacity.

“This is just an eight-week, not a very long exercise intervention,” Traustadóttir said. “And we were able to show differences that after the exercise training, there was less of an oxidative stress.”
Traustadóttir also found that those in the exercise group had less oxidative stress than those in the control group who were not exercising. And the more a person had improved their fitness, the lower the stress response, whatever someone’s age.

Why exercise can boost resilience
The study suggested that for the running mice, exercise had increased galanin levels and helped them become more resilient.

Exercise “has profound effects on the way that your brain functions and how the neurons function,” said David Weinshenker, a professor of human genetics at Emory University and the senior author of the study. “It can actually change the neurochemistry in your brain and promote general brain health.”

Even walking can change the brain
“That really just means changeability, literally a building of connections in the brain,” he said. “And one thing that we found that exercise does is it promotes these connections in the prefrontal cortex, which is a critical area for emotion regulation.”

“We want to experience manageable stressors so that we can develop stress resilience and not react with a big stress response every time something unexpected happens,” said Elissa Epel, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco and the author of “The Stress Prescription: Seven Days to More Joy and Ease.” “Our body not only can handle acute stress but loves it, and expects it when it’s short-term and manageable.”

The amount and intensity of exercise needed to improve stress resilience depends on the person, according to Tinna Traustadóttir, an associate professor of biological sciences at Northern Arizona University and the senior author of a 2021 study on the effects of exercise training on physiological stress resilience in adults.

In the study, the researchers randomly assigned 40 sedentary women and men, about half of them young adults and the rest aged 60 and older, to either eight-weeks of aerobic exercise training or a non-exercise control group.
One of Traustadóttir’s takeaways is that to build resilience, it’s not so much about what particular exercises are done, but doing them consistently.

“It’s whatever people will enjoy and will therefore do on a regular basis,” she said.

Studies of stressed-out mice offer clues to why exercise can help us cope better with stress and become more resilient.

In one series of experiments, researchers at Emory University studied the stress response in mice, some of which were allowed to run to their heart’s content on exercise wheels while others were kept inactive.

After three weeks, the scientists checked for markers of a brain chemical called galanin, which is known to increase with exercise and is associated with mental health. (People with variants in galanin-related genes are at higher risk for depression and anxiety disorders.)
As expected, the running mice showed higher levels of galanin. In fact, the more a mouse had run, the more of the brain chemical it had.
To induce stress, the researchers subjected the mice to mild shocks on their paws. All the mice were stressed by the experience, but the running mice bounced back sooner, returning to normal mouse behavior. Meanwhile, the non-running rodents continued to cower, still overwhelmed by stress.

Philip Holmes, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Georgia, defines stress resilience as the “ability to adapt to stress in a way that’s not deleterious.”

Part of his research deals with the neurobiological mechanisms responsible for stress resilience and the neurobiological effects of exercise. The most significant impact that exercise has on brain function is to promote neuroplasticity, Holmes said.

Holmes’s research on rats and mice shows that even moderate exercise can activate the locus coeruleus, a small brainstem nucleus that is important for attention, arousal, motivation and cognitive function.

The exercise Holmes studied in rodents is analogous to brisk walking by humans. The locus coeruleus neurons make substances called trophic factors, which promote the building of neural circuits. The stress-resilient parts of the brain get better, healthier circuits while activated, Holmes said.

“So, every time we walk around the neighborhood, you’re making more of these trophic factors, building more of these circuits,” he said. “It may just be a little bit, but that will be beneficial.”

Weinshenker agrees that moderate exercise can change the neurochemistry in our brains and says any aerobic exercise that gets your heart rate up can be beneficial for stress resilience.

“It doesn’t even have to be vigorous exercise. It could be something just as simple as walking for 20 or 30 minutes a day,” he said. “It could be walking, running, biking, swimming. People play a lot of pickleball now.”

Epel calls the short, concentrated bursts of acute stress to our bodies, such as the stress we experience during exercise, “hormetic stress.”

The term hormetic, she explains in her book, refers to “something that in a larger dose would be harmful, but in a smaller dose is quite beneficial.”

“Hormetic stress works almost like a vaccine,” Epel writes. “You receive a micro-dose of the ‘virus’ (stress), and then, later, when you face a large, intense similar stressor, you’re essentially inoculated against it.”