Here's Today's Feel-Good Story:
Exercise does the body good and strengthens muscles and helps bones, blood vessels, and our immune system. Researchers at MIT have found that exercise also benefits individual neurons as well. When muscles contract during exercise, they release a lot of biochemicals, called myokines, that help neurons grow four times farther than those not exposed to the myokines.
“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 Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and senior author of the study Ritu Raman,. “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.”