מתוך medicontext.co.il
By Joene Hendry
WESTPORT, CT (Reuters Health) – It is possible for healthy individuals to significantly increase the strength in their finger abductor and elbow flexor muscles through mental training alone, researchers reported Sunday during the Society of Neuroscience meeting in San Diego.
"Just thinking about exercise can help maintain muscle strength," Dr. Vinoth Ranganathan of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation told Reuters Health.
Dr. Ranganathan and colleagues enlisted 30 young healthy volunteers between 20 and 35 years old to engage in a program of mental muscle contractions while they refrained from participating in physical exercise. The subjects first focused on how their muscles worked during maximum force exercise training, Dr. Ranganathan said.
Two groups of ten subjects were then trained to perform mental contractions of either the abductor digiti minimi or the elbow flexor muscles for 15 minutes per day, 5 days a week, for 12 weeks. The control group did not perform mental exercises. The investigators used electromyography daily to ensure that the subjects were not actually moving the muscles.
Results of electromyography performed at baseline and after training showed that finger abduction strength increased by more than 35% and elbow flexion strength increased by 13.5% in the exercise groups versus controls (p < 0.005).
Dr. Ranganathan's group found that brain signals were highly visible on triggered electroencephalogram recordings obtained while the subjects were performing mental exercises. Post-training functional MRI showed greater and more focused activity in the prefrontal cortex compared with pre-training images.
The combined electromyogram and triggered EEG data indicate that strength gains are a consequence of improvements in central nervous system signals to muscle, the investigators suggest.
A followup study is under way in healthy subjects 65 years and older to determine the efficacy of mental exercise training in an older population, Dr. Ranganathan told Reuters Health. "We then hope to use this in a clinical setting in stroke and spinal cord patients," he said.
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