Letter to Editor about: 'Physical exercise increases GFAP expression and induces morphological changes in hippocampal astrocytes'

摘要

The article entitled "Physical exercise increases GFAP expression and induces morphological changes in hippo-campal astrocytes" recently published in Brain Structure and Functions elegantly demonstrated that a protocol of light intensity exercise induced an increased GFAP expression and number of astrocytes associated with morphological changes in astrocytes of CA1 Stratum Radiatum (Saur et al. 2013). The authors studied the astrocytic plasticity in adult brain (Gibbs et al. 2008), a very important issue in neu-roscience. They discussed different results obtained after the light intensity exercise protocol and after the environmental enrichment (EE) protocol applied by Viola et al. (2009). In fact, despite exercise being one of the components of EE (Nithianantharajah and Hannan 2006), that is these conflicting findings between the two protocols (Faherty et al. 2003; Brown et al. 2003), in our point of view, could be explained by different factors.