The expanded HD gene down regulates brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Researchers are working on a pill to increase BDNF to treat HD.
Here are few things to do to increase BDNF while waiting for the pill.
Fast food eaters should take heed from Pinilla's finding that a high-fat, high sucrose diet causes a decline in BDNF and a similar decline in brain function.
Moderate exercise boosts brain function and also may help the brain heal itself, researchers told the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting Tuesday.
Many people know the toll high-fat foods and a sedentary lifestyle take on health, but few are aware these bad habits also affect memory and ability to learn.
One study by Japanese researchers found joggers out-performed non-joggers on a series of learning and memory tests. All of the tasks required the use of the prefrontal cortex, the brain area located behind the forehead and used to perform complex functions.
The researchers compared seven young healthy joggers with seven similar non-joggers. After a regimen of running 30 minutes a day for 12 weeks, the joggers excelled at memorization exercises and multi-tasking.
"The tests showed that joggers had a clear improvement in prefrontal function over non-joggers," said lead author Dr. Kisou Kubota of Nihon Fukushi University in Japan. "These improvements, however, went down when the joggers stopped their training, which suggests that ongoing exercise is required to maintain the benefit."
The Japanese team plans to use brain imaging to get a better understanding of what happens in the prefrontal cortex after exercise.
Scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles believe a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor is responsible for exercise's benefit on brain function.
Led by Dr. Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, the researchers examined the levels of BDNF in the hippocampus of rats and found the smarter rats had higher levels of the protein. They also discovered exercise increased the rats' ability to perform memory and learning tasks by boosting the levels of BDNF in the brain.
"The results open the possibility that exercise has a more fundamental role in neural function than previously believed," said Dr. Gomez-Pinilla.
Fast food eaters should take heed from Pinilla's finding that a high-fat, high sucrose diet causes a decline in BDNF and a similar decline in brain function. But, for those who cannot give up french fries or sodas, healthy brain function can be maintained if they also exercise.
"This suggests that exercise can be used as a compensatory strategy to ameliorate the effects of an unhealthy diet on cognition and neural function," Pinilla said.
Dr. David Albeck of the University of Colorado in Boulder said the findings have important clinical implications.
"The groups which might benefit most from regular voluntary exercise are depressed people, those with mood disorders and old people," he said.
Kubota plans to further explore the therapeutic benefit of exercise in a larger study on young and old subjects.
"We also may be able to find a way to use exercise...to help aged people and those with Alzheimer's disease who tend to perform worse on some complex prefrontal learning and memory tasks," said Dr. Kubota.