Intergenerational transmission of the positive effects of physical exercise on brain and cognition

Abstract

Physical exercise has positive effects on cognition, but very little is known about the inheritance of these effects to sedentary offspring and the mechanisms involved. Here, we use a patrilineal design in mice to test the transmission of effects from the same father (before or after training) and from different fathers to compare sedentary- and runner-father progenies. Behavioral, stereological, and whole-genome sequence analyses reveal that paternal cognition improvement is inherited by the offspring, along with increased adult neurogenesis, greater mitochondrial citrate synthase activity, and modulation of the adult hippocampal gene expression profile. These results demonstrate the inheritance of exercise-induced cognition enhancement through the germline, pointing to paternal physical activity as a direct factor driving offspring’s brain physiology and cognitive behavior.

Intergenerational Transmission of Diet‐Induced Obesity, Metabolic Imbalance, and Osteoarthritis in Mice

“…In addition to the direct effects of obesity on OA, growing evidence is now showing that prenatal and postnatal development are affected by both nutrition and environmental stimuli, particularly in the context of obesity . The health of future offspring is thought to be influenced by diet and exercise aspects of parental lifestyle . Some diseases in children, such as cancer and type 2 diabetes mellitus, have been shown to correlate with both maternal and paternal obesity .…”

Differential susceptibility to endocrine disruptor-induced epimutagenesis

“…One recent encouraging observation noted that DNA methylation epimutations induced by EDC exposure in utero could be corrected by supplementation of the maternal diet with methyl donors such as folic acid [ 174 ]. This finding suggests there may indeed be effective ways to mitigate or reverse the deleterious effects of exposures to environmental disruptions such as EDCs simply by promoting consumption of a healthy diet or increasing daily exercise [ 197–199 ].…”

Is There a Role of Epigenetically Inherited Neurogenesis on Infantile Amnesia? Commentary: Intergenerational Transmission of the Positive Effects of Physical Exercise on Brain and Cognition

“…Recently, Josselyn and Frankland (2012) proposed a biological hypothesis which proposes that high rates of postnatal hippocampal neurogenesis are the cause of the failure to retain infant memories. If the appearance of Infantile amnesia is a consequence of high levels of neurogenesis, and according to the recent study of McGreevy et al (2019) there is an inheritance of basal neurogenesis levels, then, the extent of infantile amnesia might be inherited by an epigenetic mechanism.…”

“…A massive generation of new mossy fibers from the dentate gyrus to hippocampus-CA3 modifies, or displaces previous synaptic contacts (Toni et al, 2008) and might degrade previously acquired episodic-like memories. The recent study of McGreevy et al (2019) shows that exercised male mice sire offspring with high rates of hippocampal neurogenesis Although, such high levels of neurogenesis occur in adult mice, normally the rates of proliferation decay with age (Lagace et al, 2007), an effect possibly linked to a decrease and senescence of the pool of neural stem cells (Cameron and McKay, 1999). Then, infantile and juvenile individuals might probably have higher neurogenesis rates than the offspring of sedentary parents.…”

“…Likewise, they show an increase in hippocampal mitochondrial activity and the activation of certain transcription machinery genes, which could regulate the expression of proliferation-associated proteins. Therefore, given that high rates of neurogenesis are present in litters of runner parents (McGreevy et al, 2019), this phenomenon is probably present from infantile stages, in which case, it might increase infantile amnesia.…”