Clean Air, Better Brain

On The Rundown, personalized coaching gets an app, pollution decreases the brain benefits of exercise and drops may not be the only way to relieve dry, itchy eyes.

Remote Coach. The Givego app uses video-analysis tools to let amateur athletes get personalized tips and advice from world-class athletes and experts. After uploading a 20-second video of yourself doing your activity, you describe what you’re working on and connect with a coach who will send you a slow motion video analysis of your submission with voiceover, drawing and full annotation. The app has professionals in a range of different sports and pricing is per session or subscription fee.

Clean Air, Better Brain. According to two new large-scale studies, exercising in polluted air mostly cancels the brain benefits you get from a workout. For the first study, researchers from the University of Arizona and the University of Southern California examined records for 8,600 middle-aged British adults enrolled in the UK Biobank. (The Biobank holds extensive demographic and health data on more than 500,000 British adults).

The scientists focused on people who had worn activity monitors for a week, had a brain scan, and typically chose a vigorous form of exercise, like running, which meant they breathed heavily and consequently drew in more air pollutants. For comparison, they included people who had never worked out intensely. The final step was to use established air quality standards to estimate air pollution levels where the people lived and compare everyone’s brain scans.

The researchers discovered that people who lived and exercised in areas with even moderate air pollution had smaller gray matter volume (the brain’s essential working neurons) and more white matter lesions (when cells that connect and support neurons shrink and fray) than those who lived and exercised away from pollution, even when their workouts were similar.

The same researchers conducted a follow-up study, repeating parts of the experiment with another 35,562 older Biobank participants, comparing exercise habits, pollution levels where they lived and diagnoses of dementia. The data indicated that if the local air was clean, the more people exercised, the less likely they were to develop dementia. Their long-term risk of dementia increased if the air was moderately polluted, whether or not they exercised.

It’s important to note that while the studies show links between polluted air, exercise and brain health, they cannot prove that pollution directly prevents the brain benefits of exercise or how this might happen. But, the results do suggest that air quality influences a workout and for the wellbeing of our brains, we should try not to exercise in bad air.

Hold the Eye Drops. If you suffer from dry, itchy eyes, researchers say moving more could bring relief. When we blink, our eyes are covered in a tear film that hydrates the ocular surface and protects against irritants. The surface can develop dry spots, which cause itchiness, stinging or burning sensations when any part of the tear film becomes unstable. A typical treatment is eye drops but a team from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada set out to discover whether physical activity could be an effective alternative to preventing dryness.

The study divided 52 participants into an athlete and non-athlete group. The athlete group exercised on a treadmill five times per week. The non-athlete group exercised once per week. Researchers, including experts from the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, conducted visual examinations to assess tear secretion and tear break-up time before and five minutes after each exercise session. All participants showed a boost in tear quantity and tear film stability after a workout but those in the athletic group experienced the largest increase.