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

The article is high-quality, very well-designed, and presents highly relevant and interesting results for the neurobiology of exercise.

It was known that exercise has direct effects on physical endurance (it was even published in 2025 that this increase from exercise is inherited and transmitted to the first generation—sedentary—when parents exercise, and the mechanisms of this inheritance were discovered), but the mechanisms by which exercise increases endurance itself in the individual exercising were still unknown.

The major novelty of this work is that it reveals that one of the essential factors/mechanisms for this is a modification that takes place in the brain. That is, the changes induced by exercise in the brain (specifically in the hypothalamus) subsequently lead to physiological/metabolic changes in the body. This is no less remarkable for being unexpected.

The limitations are threefold: we do not yet know if these brain changes also induce other known changes induced by exercise, especially in the brain (changes in cognitive ability and/or memory, for example). We also do not know if other exercise-induced mechanisms are responsible for the changes reported in this study in the hypothalamic nucleus (for example, the gut microbiota, according to our findings published last summer). And we should know more about the neural circuitry that mediates all of this (the present findings only tell us about the hypothalamic nucleus, not about what information reaches these neurons, nor where the information processed by these neurons goes afterward).