• USA Today articles, both quoting Michael Zigmond—professor of neurology, neurobiology, and psychiatry in Pitt’s School of Medicine and the codirector of the National Parkinson’s Disease Center of Excellence—report that the second scenario is scientifically plausible.

One article, titled “Exercise your option to keep your brain cells active,” presented tips for keeping the brain healthy, including staying physically fit. “My guess is that we’re going to discover that we should be exercising most days of the week,” Zigmond noted in that USA Today article. He and other researchers recommend physical activity like complex dance routines that involve a mental challenge as opposed to monotonous exercise, like stationary bike riding, during which individuals have a tendency to zone out.

The other article, titled “Research shows exercise protects against Parkinson’s,” presented the findings of several recent studies by researchers from Pitt, Harvard University, and the University of Southern California suggesting that physical activity might protect neurons in the brain from the ongoing damage of Parkinson’s. Zigmond and his Pitt colleagues have found that exercise offered rats a powerful shield against a Parkinson’s-like disease. The rats in Zigmond’s study were injected with a toxin that kills brain cells, yet the rats never developed symptoms and had almost no sign of damage to the brain, including to the dopamine-producing neurons that, in humans, control movement and are gravely affected by Parkinson’s. “Exercise almost completely protected against the loss of these neurons,” Zigmond explained. According to the latter article, at a November meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, Zigmond presented evidence to show that the benefit of exercise results from the production of chemicals called neurotrophic factors. Exercise appears to spur certain brain cells to release these chemicals, which then protect brain cells damaged by Parkinson’s disease.