Lifetime sports and exercise experience are associated with cognitive, social, and resting-state brain activity in adults.

Abstract

Sports/exercise engagement across the lifetime has been proposed to contribute to cognitive reserve and promote healthy brain aging. Few studies have examined whether past sports experiences are associated with current cognitive and social functions and resting-state brain activity in lifespan. The present study aimed to address that gap. Ninety healthy participants aged 20-83 years were categorized into four groups based on their self-reported sports experience: single sports (N = 25), team sports (N = 11), combined single and team sports (N = 20), and no experience (N = 34). We assessed cognitive function, social adaptation, and quality of life. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data were analyzed using amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations and seed-based functional connectivity to investigate local spontaneous activity and network-level integration. Participants with sports experience demonstrated enhanced performance in several cognitive tasks and higher social adaptation scores than those without experience. Neuroimaging analyses revealed increased amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations in the right middle frontal gyrus in the team-sport group. Furthermore, exploratory functional connectivity analysis showed reduced coupling between the right middle frontal gyrus and posterior sensory-visual regions, including the postcentral gyrus, lateral occipital cortex, and occipital fusiform gyrus. These findings suggest that lifetime sports engagement may be associated with differences in cognitive and psychosocial functioning, together with a tentative pattern of resting-state brain variation. Although the observed connectivity pattern may be broadly consistent with accounts of functional specialization or neural efficiency, the principal ALFF finding did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. Accordingly, the neuroimaging results should be regarded as preliminary and hypothesis-generating rather than confirmatory, while still providing a concrete basis for future hypothesis-driven investigation.