Think/Move

In this week's edition, exercise is for thinking, a fitness wearable goes extinct and your weekly recommendations.

The Rundown

Think/Move. A new study makes a strong case that exercise is one of the best things you can do for your brain. The research comes at a time when the scientific community has been questioning how powerful working out actually is for brain health, considering that a major review published a few months ago noted that many human studies of exercise and cognition have been too small to show persuasive benefits.

The team behind the new paper says exercise should be recommended as a way to maintain mental sharpness as we age and their results are intriguing. Using a unique and complex statistical analysis to move beyond traditional observational research, they looked at DNA and Mendelian randomization, which uses genetic variation to characterize and sort people. Basically, this approach says each of us is born with or without certain snippets of DNA, some of which are known to contribute to a likelihood of being physically active. Other gene snippets play a similar role in cognition.

With this in mind, scientists can discover the extent that exercise contributes to thinking skills by checking the cognitive scores of people who have or don’t have the exercise gene snippet against people with the gene variant related to cognition.

For the study, the researchers examined genetic data for almost 350,000 people of all ages, as well as objective measurements of physical activity for almost 91,000 of them and cognitive scores for about 258,000.

They found that people with a genetic predisposition to exercise typically worked out and they also scored better on thinking tests, if they exercised moderately (comparable to jogging). A lead author of the paper noted that the relationship between exercise and thinking was strong enough to indicate causation.

While follow-up studies are planned, the takeaway is that exercise should reliably protect our ability to think.

Halo No More. It’s bad news of users of Halo fitness trackers. Amazon announced that it will no longer sell the Halo lineup, which includes the health tracking wearable and a bedside sleep tracker called Halo Rise.

On July 31, the company will stop supporting Halo devices and the app. Users can delete their Halo health data from the app and any remaining data will be deleted by August 1.

Amazon said it will refund any purchases made in the last year of Halo View, Halo Band, Halo Rise and Halo accessory bands. It will also refund any unused Halo subscription fees.

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