The effects of whole-body vibration on brain functions: A novel approach to stimulate the brain?

The higher risk of age-related diseases and their associated comorbidities have spread significantly worldwide and caused significant burdens to the health care systems. One of the most effective treatments for age-related diseases is physical activity that has been widely acknowledge to induce significant benefits on both physical and cognitive health. However, what to do if the patients are hampered from perform active physical exercise due to limitations in their cognitive and physical capabilities?
Whole Body Vibration (WBV) is an alternative type of exercise interventions based on the use of vibrating platforms, often referred as form of „passive exercise” that can be applied regardless the patient’s cognitive and physical capabilities. In this thesis, we aimed to progress towards the revealing of the behavioral, neurological and physiological, as well as the molecular and cellular aspects of WBV through multiple preclinical experiments including animal models for Alzheimer’s disease, healthy aging and post-operative decline.
We found that WBV can ameliorate outcomes of anxiety-like behavior, unprompted locomotor activity and different aspects of memory functions. These findings seem to be accompanied by improved hippocampal neurogenesis, hippocampal neuroinflammation and glial pathology. Furthermore, enhanced muscle strength and motor coordination were also found as the well-known consequences of well-controlled WBV exposure.
Our data suggest that WBV can be considered as a relevant auxiliary exercise strategy to improve motor and cognitive performance. However, findings do not always show unanimity among these experiments indicating that further optimization of the WBV protocol is needed. Taken together, our work demonstrated that research on WBV is still imperative and new targets for application and research questions should be combined with more focus on translational research.