Grandfathers Can Pass Down Exercise Benefits to Grandsons, Study Suggests

The cognitive benefits of exercise have been well-documented in studies for years, but a recent study suggests that grandfathers who improve their cognitive health through workouts can pass down those benefits to their future generations. 

The research, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, built on past findings that found cognitive improvements resulting from physical exercise can be passed on from parents to their offspring. The next step for scientists was to see if the same phenomenon can be observed in offspring two generations after exercise improved cognitive function. 

"We set out to explore whether these enhancements might extend transgenerationally, impacting [grandchildren]," the researchers wrote in the study. 

To do this, the team examined the behavior of second-generation male mice whose grandfathers exercised, as opposed to a control group that remained sedentary. The researchers discovered that the cognitive boosts that the grandfathers received from working out were similarly seen in their grandsons. 

"Our findings revealed that [second-generation] mice with physically active [grandfathers] displayed significantly improved memory recall, encompassing both spatial and non-spatial information when compared to their counterparts from sedentary [grandfathers]." This, they said, "prov[es] for the first time the transgenerational inheritance of physical exercise-induced cognitive enhancement."

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More research needs to be done into this phenomenon, at the very least to include female mice rather than focusing on males and their grandsons to determine if these cognitive benefits can similarly be passed down from grandmothers to granddaughters. Eventually, studies involving human test subjects might be able to confirm these findings for people as well as rodents.