What mediates the relationship between physical activity and cognition?

摘要

Promoting healthy lifestyles, such as engagement in physical activity, has been a major endeavour in many countries. The reasons given for promoting physical activity mainly focus on the health benefits, physical health in particular. The cognitive benefits of physical activity are an important part of mental health and have also received much attention in the last few decades. This may be attributed to the increasing desire to understand the human brain, the last frontier of our body, as advances in technology allow us to study brain structure and function in both clinical and healthy individuals. Resulting knowledge of the close relationship between mind and body, as well as the plasticity of the brain, motivates us to use physical activity as a nonpharmaceutical and legal doping approach for maintaining and enhancing brain performance. This has many implications for the promotion of physical activity.