Regardless of gender, young adults who have greater aerobic fitness also have greater volume of their entorhinal cortex, an area of the brain responsible for memory. Better aerobic fitness however does not appear to impact hippocampal volume, another area in the brain responsible for memory.
While aerobic fitness is not directly associated with performance on a recognition memory task, the participants with a larger entorhinal cortex also performed better on the recognition memory task. These findings by Boston University School of medicine (BUSM) researchers appear in the journal NeuroImage.
The entorhinal cortex is a brain area known to show early pathology in Alzheimer's disease, which is characterized by profound memory impairment.
