Influence of Physical Exercise on Traumatic Brain Injury Deficits: Scaffolding Effect

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) may be due to a bump, blow, or jolt to the head or a penetrating head injury that disrupts normal brain function; it presents an ever-growing, serious public health problem that causes a considerable number of fatalities and cases of permanent disability annually. Physical exercise restores the healthy homeostatic regulation of stress, affect and the regulation of hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis. Physical activity attenuates or reverses the performance deficits observed in neurocognitive tasks. It induces anti-apoptotic effects and buttresses blood–brain barrier intactness. Exercise offers a unique non-pharmacologic, non-invasive intervention that incorporates different regimes, whether dynamic or static, endurance, or resistance. Exercise intervention protects against vascular risk factors that include hypertension, diabetes, cellular inflammation, and aortic rigidity. It induces direct changes in cerebrovasculature that produce beneficial changes in cerebral blood flow, angiogenesis and vascular disease improvement. The improvements induced by physical exercise regimes in brain plasticity and neurocognitive performance are evident both in healthy individuals and in those afflicted by TBI. The overlap and inter-relations between TBI effects on brain and cognition as related to physical exercise and cognition may provide lasting therapeutic benefits for recovery from TBI. It seems likely that some modification of the notion of scaffolding would postulate that physical exercise reinforces the adaptive processes of the brain that has undergone TBI thereby facilitating the development of existing networks, albeit possibly less efficient, that compensate for those lost through damage.