Get out there and exercise if you want to think better and recover more…
Thats the message in this new research.
In as little as a few months, antipsychotic medications can tame the delusions and hallucinations that characterize schizophrenia. But the medications do little to reverse the less familiar brain-based problems that accompany the illness.
Affecting memory, the speed at which the brain processes information, attention, problem-solving skills and emotional intelligence, these subtle but profound deficits can prove more crippling than schizophrenia’s more dramatic and better-known symptoms.
“They tend to be the things that lead people with schizophrenia to go on disability and to become unable to work and to be socially isolated,” said Keith Nuechterlein, a professor at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. “Families go through a stage almost like mourning because their loved one changes so dramatically.”
Schizophrenia affects 1 percent of the population, and research has shown that computer-based brain games sometimes can reverse one-quarter to one-third of the deficits in the areas of memory, thinking skills and social cognition. But Nuechterlein and a team of researchers at a free schizophrenia clinic at UCLA are finding that those benefits increase dramatically if they are turbocharged with aerobic exercise.
“It’s looking like exercising the body along with the mind has the potential to alter the course of schizophrenia, especially if the treatment is applied early in the disorder,” said Joe Ventura, a senior research psychologist at the Semel Institute.
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