The Influence Of Badminton Playing On Adults’ Brain Plasiticity

Previous studies have investigated whether sports experiences influence the brain plasticity by comparing the professional athletes and ordinary with no specific sports experiences.However,these experiment designs belong to cross-sectional design which can not exclude the influences of innate factor and early sports training of an athlete.Therefore,the present study used a longitudinal design and aimed to explore whether a badminton experience can influence brain plasticity in adults from the perspectives of resting-state function,structure and brain network.In the present study,we recruited college students with no experience of badminton,other ball game,other antagonistic sports(including watching sports games)or exercise habits as the participants.Then,they were randomly divided into two groups:experimental group and control group.The experimental group received 12-week badminton training,while the control group did not take part in any regular sports training and maintained original state of life during the whole experiment.Each participant received functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI)scanning before and after the 12-week badminton training,separately.For each participant,resting-state fMRI data,structure data and diffusion tensor imaging(DTI)data were acquired and functional and structural brain network were constructed.The results from different perspectives showed the plasticity of hippocampus,superior parietal lobe and occipital lobe.Specially,experimental group had increased amplitude of low frequency fluctuations(ALFF),gray matter volumes and nodal efficiency in function network in hippocampus and decreased ALFF and betweenness centrality in structure network both in superior parietal lobe and middle occipital lobe after training.These results indicate that badminton playing not only changes these brain regions’ structures and functions but also changes their information transfer efficiency and importance in brain network.Furthermore,the results of resting-state function also showed that experimental group had increased ALFF in prefrontal lobe and decreased ALFF in cerebellum and insula after training.The results of structure also showed that experimental group had decreased gray matter volumes in primary motor cortex and thalamus and increased fraction anisotropy(FA)in many fibers connecting cerebellum,base ganglion and cerebral cortex after training.The results of brain network also showed that in function network,experimental group had increased nodal efficiency in middle/superior temporal gyrus and amygdala after training;in structure network,experimental group had decreased nodal efficiency in the two regions after training.In conclusion,12-week badminton training altered adults’ brain plasticity including front-parietal network related to cognitive control(e.g.,middle/inferior frontal gyrus,orbit frontal cortex,and superior parietal lobe),sensorimotor network related to motor performing(e.g.,primary motor cortex),cerebellum related to limb coordination,hippocampus related to spatial information processing,occipital lobe related to visual processing(e.g.,middle occipital gyrus and lingual gyrus),middle/superior temporal gyrus related to social cognition,insula related to anticipation and base ganglion related to motor skill learning(e.g.,thalamus and amygdala).