Reacción a "The benefits of physical exercise may depend on certain brain changes, according to a study in mice"

The article is of good quality, with a sound experimental design. A noteworthy aspect is the link provided to a repository containing the study data, which demonstrates the transparency of the research and the researchers, and facilitates the reproducibility of the results.

It aligns with previous studies that have observed changes in the brain after exercise in rats. This study addresses a specific question regarding the effect of exercise, both single and repeated over several days, on specific brain cells in mice.

I don't consider this a groundbreaking discovery in research, but rather an incremental study, which doesn't mean it's irrelevant; on the contrary. Scientific knowledge is cumulative, and this represents another step in understanding how the brain adapts to the physical and metabolic demands of exercise. Animal models are useful in the initial stages of research, given the difficulty of studying the human brain and obtaining causal evidence.

I'm not an expert in animal research, but one limitation could be the sample size, which isn't very large. On the other hand, the main limitation is that it's a study with mice, so the conclusions shouldn't be generalized to humans. In this sense, I think it's very important that any press release on the subject makes it clear from the outset that it's an animal study—interesting and providing relevant evidence—but whose results cannot be extrapolated to people.

There's a lot of hype surrounding everything related to brain exercise, and yet, I don't think the research is consolidated with robust evidence. There's a lot of very interesting research that's adding to our knowledge, but it's premature to draw conclusions about the effects on people.