Need a brain boost? Fitness may not be for you!
It is more common than not to hear exercising will provide a range of mental health benefits, but new research suggests there is “little evidence” showing a correlation between improved cognitive health and physical exercise.
Analyzing data from over 100 individual trials involving more than 11,000 “healthy participants” found “inconclusive evidence” that physical exercise improves cognitive ability, according to findings published by Nature Human Behaviour.
“After re-analyzing 24 meta-analyses of RCTs (randomized controlled trials), including a total of 109 primary studies and 11,266 healthy participants, we found inconclusive evidence supporting the existence of a potential cognitive benefit derived from the regular practice of physical exercise in healthy populations,” Lead researcher Luis Ciria and his team found during their analysis.
Ciria, a postdoctoral researcher with the Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center at the University of Granada in Spain, said his team’s findings “suggest” claims linking exercise to improved cognitive ability should be advised with caution until “more reliable causal evidence accumulates.”
Ciria and his team opted to conduct an umbrella analysis to reevaluate the data presented in 24 different RCTs and found that these trials often have too few participating subjects to evaluate appropriately and may be prone to bias, frequently miss contradictions or mixed findings.
“In line with recent accounts, we believe this exponential accumulation of low-quality evidence has led to stagnation rather than advance in the field, hindering the discernment of the real existing effect,” Ciria wrote.
Some studies compared the exercise group to an utterly inactive group, while others compared it to less active groups.
As expected, considerable benefits were typically detected when the exercise group was compared to the sedentary groups.
Other studies found that physical exercise had a significant benefit when the initial mental performance of the experimental group was lower than that of the control group.
By re-evaluating the data with these possible biases in mind, the researchers found little benefit to the healthy person’s brain because they exercised.
Ciria and his team’s findings
