Exercise is good also for a healthy hippocampus

OBJECTIVES: The aim of the study was to compare the hippocampus sizes of healthy medical faculty students, who were exposed to an intense data input and who underwent serious learning activity and those of healthy sport faculty students who did sports regularly by using MR images and to examine the relationship between a hippocampus size and intelligence. METHODS: We made the study with 58 healthy young males (27 sport sciences faculty students and 31 medical faculty students). R. B. Cattell 3A Culture Fair Intelligence Test was administered to the volunteers. Following this, we got MR images of our volunteers. RESULTS: We could not find a statistically significant difference between medical faculty students and sport sciences faculty students in terms of hippocampus volumes. We could not find a correlation between IQ values and hippocampus volumes. Also, we could not find a significant difference between a right and left hippocampus. CONCLUSION: While doing sport, blood flow increases in the hippocampus, as in all areas of the body. This increased blood flow creates a stimulating effect on neurogenesis. Neurons, which develop as the result of neurogenesis, mean an increase in volume (Tab. 4, Ref. 54).