Imagine All Those Enhanced Brain Cells

"We found that the babies who were born from the mothers who were active had a much more mature brain response. The brain response corresponded to that of babies of six to eight months of age."
Dr. Dave Ellemberg, Professor, Department of Kinesiology, University of Montreal

(Photo: University of Montreal) As little as 20 minutes of moderate exercise three times per week during pregnancy enhances the newborn child's brain development, according to researchers at the University of Montreal and its affiliated CHU Sainte-Justine children's hospital. This head-start could have an impact on the child's entire life.

Doting parents determined to have offspring who are smarter, more capable of absorbing information and learning than other peoples' children are known to go to extraordinary means to accomplish that feature in their offspring. Everything from reading science literature out loud to their babies in utero, to reading to them complex journals when they are infants in the hope that the challenge to understand will result in baby geniuses.

Playing the music of the classical composers to the unborn child was thought to have a salutary effect on their development, to increase the baby's willingness to become a voracious learner, to eclipse all other children whose needs are neglected by being treated like babies, instead of being exposed to extraordinary and somewhat misplaced opportunities to massage those grey cells.

Just as expecting mothers are encouraged to eat nutritious foods, to ensure that they absorb all the necessary food groups in proper proportions, avoiding alcohol, tobacco and drugs to have a good birth outcome for their babies, mothers may soon be exhorted to fully exercise themselves physically on a regular schedule to help their baby's forming brain become more energetically attuned to development.

A team at the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Montreal, led by Dr. Dave Ellemberg, considered rat experiments whose results had been published a decade earlier by other researchers, suggesting maternal exercise results in a higher density of neurons in the hippocampus of the fetal brain. Born to mothers who exercised on a running wheel, rat pups performed better at birth than those born to sedentary mothers.

Eighteen women in their second trimester of pregnancy were involved in this new, human experiment. Half were randomly selected to take part in the exercise group, the other half was advised to avoid exercise. The exercise consisted of a minimum of 20 minutes' duration, three times weekly, at moderate intensity. They would know they had exercised appropriately if they were left feeling slightly breathless.

The woman were all screened beforehand to ensure they all shared equal levels of education, socio-economic status, and health habits. A week to two weeks after birth researchers measured neuron activity related to memory in the babies. They fitted each baby with an electrode cap to measure and record brain activity through an EEG (electroencephalogram).

The researchers are testing the babies' cognitive, motor and language development as they mature toward their first year of life. Exercise in pregnancy, according to Dr. Jon Barrett, professor of obstetrics at the University of Toronto, head of maternal fetal medicine at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, is positive for the mother. It helps to lower the risk of pregnancy-related high blood pressure and gestational diabetes.

A physically fit woman can expect a pregnancy to be easier, and labour shorter; that's beyond dispute. Before a definitive conclusion can be reached respecting these new baby-neural-enhanced findings, a repeat study would have to be performed, with a larger number of women involved. The initial conclusion, that exercise during pregnancy may influence the "neuronal circuitry" of the developing brain sounds good, and likely is correct but could use repeat corroboration.