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Exercise is believed to have significant cognitive benefits. Although an array of experimental paradigms have been employed to test the cognitive effects on exercising individuals, the mechanism as to how exercise induces cognitive benefits in the brain remains unclear. This study explores the effect of dynamic neural network processing with the classic Go/NoGo task with regular exercisers. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to analyze the brain activation of areas involved in executive function, especially inhibitory control. Nineteen regular joggers and twenty-one subjects as a control group performed the task, and their brain imaging data were analyzed. The results showed that at the attentive visual period, the frontal and parietal areas, including the prefrontal cortex, putamen, thalamus, lingual, fusiform, and caudate, were significantly enhanced in positive activities than the control group. On the other hand, in the following inhibitory control processing period, almost the same areas of the brains of the exercise group have shown stronger negative activation in comparison to the control group. Such dynamic temporal response patterns indicate that sports augment cognitive benefits; i.e., regular jogging increases the brain’s visual attention and inhibitory control capacities.

Purpose. Pain is one of the nonmotor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD) that, in order to be better managed, requires to be evaluated. Evaluations are done using pain assessment scales such as the Short-Form McGill Pain Questionnaire-2 (SF-MPQ-2). The goal of this study was to assess the psychometric properties of SF-MPQ-2 to measure pain in people with PD. Methods. Four hundred and twenty-eight PD patients with a mean (SD) age of 60.11 (11.44) years were included. Accessibility was measured through floor and ceiling effects. Dimensionality was estimated by exploratory factor analysis. The association between SF-MPQ-2 and other scales such as Neuropathic Pain Symptom Inventory, Douleur Neuropathic 4, Brief Pain Inventory, King’s Pain Parkinson’s Disease Scale, and Visual Analog Scale-Pain was considered to calculate convergent validity. Internal consistency and test-retest reliability were assessed by Cronbach’s alpha and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), respectively. Results. A noticeable floor effect was found. Dimensionality results indicated four factors for this scale. A strong relationship was found between the SF-MPQ-2 total score and other scales (r = 0.55 to 0.85). In reliability analysis, Cronbach’s alpha and ICC were 0.93 and 0.94 for SF-MPQ-2, respectively. Conclusion. The results of this study showed that SF-MPQ-2 has adequate validity and reliability to measure pain in people with Parkinson’s disease.