Physical exercise and Alexithymia: risk or benefit?

Physical activity is involved in increasing health potential. However, in sports practice a state of well-being may depend on the management of emotions. The purpose of the present study was to analyse the relationship between the type of exercise and alexithymia. Three groups of people were analyzed for the study: triathlon practitioners, people practicing Tai Chi, and sedentary people. All participants were assessed for both physical activity level and alexithymia. The results show that more athletes with alexithymia practice high-intensity exercise. Thus, there seems to be an association between alexithymia and exercise addiction. Through competitive exercise, athletes can overcome difficult challenges by employing cognitive resources on external factors, without focusing attention inward. A question emerges from this study: is alexithymia a determining factor in choosing a specific type of physical activity, or could alexithymia be triggered by overtraining? This aspect could be investigated in future studies, which could further investigate the relationship between the choice orientation of a specific sport and alexithymia. Esercizio fisico e Alessitimia: rischio o beneficio? L'attività fisica è coinvolta nell'aumento del potenziale di salute. Tuttavia, nella pratica sportiva uno stato di benessere può dipendere dalla gestione delle emozioni. Lo scopo del presente studio è stato quello di analizzare la relazione tra il tipo di esercizio fisico e l'alessitimia. Per lo studio sono stati analizzati tre gruppi di persone: praticanti di triathlon, persone che praticano il Tai Chi e persone sedentarie. Tutti i partecipanti sono stati sottoposti a una valutazione sia del livello di attività fisica che dell'alessitimia. I risultati mostrano che un maggior numero di atleti con alessitimia pratica esercizi ad alta intensità. Sembra quindi esistere un'associazione tra alessitimia e dipendenza da esercizio fisico. Attraverso l'esercizio agonistico, gli atleti possono superare sfide difficili impiegando le risorse cognitive su fattori esterni, senza focalizzare l'attenzione verso l'interno. Da questo studio emerge una domanda: l'alessitimia è un fattore determinante nella scelta di uno specifico tipo di attività fisica, oppure l'alessitimia potrebbe essere innescata dal sovrallenamento? Questo aspetto potrebbe essere indagato in studi futuri, che potrebbero approfondire la relazione tra l'orientamento alla scelta di uno sport specifico e l'alessitimia

Sensitivity to gait improvement after levodopa intake in Parkinson’s disease: A comparison study among synthetic kinematic indices

The synthetic indices are widely used to describe balance and stability during gait. Some of these are employed to describe the gait features in Parkinson's disease (PD). However, the results are sometimes inconsistent, and the same indices are rarely used to compare the individuals affected by PD before and after levodopa intake (OFF and ON condition, respectively). Our aim was to investigate which synthetic measure among Harmonic Ratio, Jerk Ratio, Golden Ratio and Trunk Displacement Index is representative of gait stability and harmony, and which of these are more sensitive to the variations between OFF and ON condition. We found that all indices, except the Jerk Ratio, significantly improve after levodopa. Only the improvement of the Trunk Displacement Index showed a direct correlation with the motor improvement measured through the clinical scale UPDRS-III (Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale-part III). In conclusion, we suggest that the synthetic indices can be useful to detect motor changes induced by, but not all of them clearly correlate with the clinical changes achieved with the levodopa administration. In our analysis, only the Trunk Displacement Index was able to show a clear relationship with the PD clinical motor improvement

Motor Imagery as a Key Factor for Healthy Ageing: A Review of New Insights and Techniques

Motor imagery (MI) describes a dynamic cognitive process where a movement is mentally simulated without taking place and holds potential as a means of stimulating motor learning and regaining motor skills. There is growing evidence that imagined and executed actions have common neural circuitry. Since MI counteracts cognitive and motor decline, a growing interest in MI-based mental exercise for older individuals has emerged. Here we review the last decade’s scientific literature on age-related changes in MI skills. Heterogeneity in the experimental protocols, as well as the use of populations with unrepresentative age, is making it challenging to draw unambiguous conclusions about MI skills preservation. Self-report and behavioural tasks have shown that some MI components are preserved, while others are impaired. Evidence from neuroimaging studies revealed that, during MI tasks, older individuals hyperactivate their sensorimotor and attentional networks. Some studies have argued that this represents a compensatory mechanism, others claim that this is a sign of cognitive decline. However, further studies are needed to establish whether MI could be used as a promotion factor to improve cognitive functioning and well-being in older people

The kinectome: A comprehensive kinematic map of human motion in health and disease

Human voluntary movement stems from the coordinated activations in space and time of many musculoskeletal segments. However, the current methodological approaches to study human movement are still limited to the evaluation of the synergies among a few body elements. Network science can be a useful approach to describe movement as a whole and to extract features that are relevant to understanding both its complex physiology and the pathophysiology of movement disorders. Here, we propose to represent human movement as a network (that we named the kinectome), where nodes represent body points, and edges are defined as the correlations of the accelerations between each pair of them. We applied this framework to healthy individuals and patients with Parkinson’s disease, observing that the patients’ kinectomes display less symmetrical patterns as compared to healthy controls. Furthermore, we used the kinectomes to successfully identify both healthy and diseased subjects using short gait recordings. Finally, we highlighted topological features that predict the individual clinical impairment in patients. Our results define a novel approach to study human movement. While deceptively simple, this approach is well-grounded, and represents a powerful tool that may be applied to a wide spectrum of framework

Boosting effect of regular sport practice in young adults: Preliminary results on cognitive and emotional abilities

Several studies have shown that physical exercise (PE) improves behavior and cognitive functioning, reducing the risk of various neurological diseases, protecting the brain from the detrimental effects of aging, facilitating body recovery after injuries, and enhancing self-efficacy and self-esteem. Emotion processing and regulation abilities are also widely acknowledged to be key to success in sports. In this study, we aim to prove that regular participation in sports enhances cognitive and emotional functioning in healthy individuals. A sample of 60 students (mean age = 22.12; SD = 2.40; M = 30), divided into sportive and sedentary, were subjected to a neuropsychological tests battery to assess their overall cognitive abilities (Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, APM), verbal and graphic fluency (Word Fluency Task and modified Five Point Test, m-FPT), as well as their emotional awareness skills (Toronto Alexithymia Scale, TAS-20). Our results showed that sportive students performed better than sedentary ones in all cognitive tasks. Regarding emotional processing abilities, significant differences were found in the TAS-20 total score as well as in the Difficulty Describing Feelings (DDF) subscale and the Difficulty Identifying Feeling (DIF) subscale. Lastly, gender differences were found in the External-Oriented Thinking (EOT) subscale. Overall, our findings evidence that PE has positive effects on cognitive functioning and emotion regulation, suggesting how sports practice can promote mental health and wellbeing

Brain network topology and personality traits: A source level magnetoencephalographic study

Personality neuroscience is focusing on the correlation between individual differences and the efficiency of large-scale networks from the perspective of the brain as an interconnected network. A suitable technique to explore this relationship is the magnetoencephalography (MEG), but not many MEG studies are aimed at investigating topological properties correlated to personality traits. By using MEG, the present study aims to evaluate how individual differences described in Cloninger's psychobiological model are correlated with specific cerebral structures. Fifty healthy individuals (20 males, 30 females, mean age: 27.4 ± 4.8 years) underwent Temperament and Character Inventory examination and MEG recording during a resting state condition. High harm avoidance scores were associated with a reduced centrality of the left caudate nucleus and this negative correlation was maintained in females when we analyzed gender differences. Our data suggest that the caudate nucleus plays a key role in adaptive behavior and could be a critical node in insular salience network. The clear difference between males and females allows us to suggest that topological organization correlated to personality is highly dependent on gender. Our findings provide new insights to evaluate the mutual influences of topological and functional connectivity in neural communication efficiency and disruption as biomarkers of psychopathological traits

The beneficial effects of physical exercise on visuospatial working memory in preadolescent children

The relationship between physical exercise and improvement in specific cognitive domains in children and adolescents who play sport has been recently reported, although the effects on visuospatial abilities have not yet been well explored. This study is aimed at evaluating in school-age children practicing artistic gymnastics the visuospatial memory by using a table version of the Radial Arm Maze (table-RAM) and comparing their performances with those ones who do not play any sport. The visuospatial performances of 14 preadolescent girls practicing artistic gymnastics aged between 7 and 10 years and those of 14 preadolescent girls not playing any sport were evaluated in the table-RAM forced-choice paradigm that allows disentangling short-term memory from working memory abilities. Data showed that the gymnasts obtained better performances than control group mainly in the parameters evaluating working memory abilities, such as within-phase errors and spatial span. Our findings emphasizing the role of physical activity on cognitive performances impel to promote physical exercise in educational and recreational contexts as well as to analyse the impact of other sports besides gymnastics on cognitive functioning

Brain Networks and Cognitive Impairment in Parkinson's Disease

: Aim: The aim of the present study is to investigate the relationship between both functional connectivity and brain networks with cognitive decline, in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Introduction: PD phenotype is not limited to motor impairment but, rather, a wide range of non-motor disturbances can occur, with cognitive impairment being one of the most common. However, how the large-scale organization of brain activity differs in cognitively impaired patients, as opposed to cognitively preserved ones, remains poorly understood. Methods: Starting from source-reconstructed resting-state magnetoencephalography data, we applied the phase linearity measurement (PLM) to estimate functional connectivity, globally and between brain areas, in PD patients with and without cognitive impairment (respectively PD-CI and PD-NC), as compared with healthy subjects (HS). Further, using graph analysis, we characterized the alterations in brain network topology and related these, as well as the functional connectivity, to cognitive performance. Results: We found reduced global and nodal PLM in several temporal (fusiform gyrus, Heschl's gyrus, and inferior temporal gyrus), parietal (postcentral gyrus), and occipital (lingual gyrus) areas within the left hemisphere, in the gamma band, in PD-CI patients, as compared with PD-NC and HS. With regard to the global topological features, PD-CI patients, as compared with HS and PD-NC patients, showed differences in multi-frequencies bands (delta, alpha, gamma) in the Leaf fraction, Tree hierarchy (Th) (both higher in PD-CI), and Diameter (lower in PD-CI). Finally, we found statistically significant correlations between the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test and both the Diameter in delta band and the Th in the alpha band. Conclusion: Our work points to specific large-scale rearrangements that occur selectively in cognitively compromised PD patients and are correlated to cognitive impairment. Impact statement In this article, we want to test the hypothesis that the cognitive decline observed in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients may be related to specific changes of both functional connectivity and brain network topology. Specifically, starting from magnetoencephalography signals and by applying the phase linearity measurement (PLM), a connectivity metric that measures the synchronization between brain regions, we were able to highlight differences in the global and nodal PLM values in PD patients with cognitive impairment as compared with both cognitively unimpaired patients and healthy subjects. Further, using graph analysis, we analyzed alterations in brain network topology that were related to cognitive functioning