A study of young Swedish men has linked cardiovascular fitness with increased intelligence, better performance on cognitive tests, and higher educational achievement. Many earlier studies have linked physical exercise with cognition in animals and humans, but most of the human studies focused on children or older adults. The few studies of young adulthood—a time when the brain changes rapidly and many cognitive traits are established—have been inconsistent.
Georg Kuhn and colleagues conducted a population-wide study using data on physical fitness and intelligence performance collected from all Swedish men born from 1950–1976 who enlisted for military service at age 18. The sample of 1,221,727 men included 268,496 full sibling pairs and 3,147 twin pairs, of which 1,432 were identical. The researchers found that cardiovascular fitness, but not muscular strength, was associated with cognitive performance on many different measures. In addition, cardiovascular fitness at age 18 often predicted socioeconomic status and educational attainment later in life. When the researchers examined the twin data, they found that environment, not genetics, played the biggest role in these associations.
These results support the notion that promoting physical exercise could serve as a public health strategy to optimize educational achievement, according to the authors.
Reference:
“Cardiovascular fitness is associated with cognition in young adulthood,” by Maria A.I. Åberg, Nancy L. Pedersen, Kjell Torén, Magnus Svartengren, Björn Bäckstrand, Tommy Johnsson, Christiana M. Cooper-Kuhn, N. David Åberg, Michael Nilsson, and H. Georg Kuhn.
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