Andreas Mierau

• PhD
• Head of Department at Int. University of Health, Exercise & Sports, Luxembourg

Background Normal aging is associated with alterations of functional connectivity (FC) in brain neuronal networks. Altered network connectivity may be associated with accelerated cognitive decline. Physical activity is considered a beneficial lifestyle factor for maintaining cognitive health. Higher intensities of physical activity may induce struc...

Active breaks are suggested to support recovery and performance in sports. Previous research in ball and team sports focused on motor performance such as repetitive sprinting or change of direction. This does not account for the interaction between motor and cognitive task demands in sports. Therefore, this study is the first to investigate the eff...

Motor‐cognitive training and exergaming often only reach low‐to‐medium intensities that limits their training efficiency. This study evaluated the physiological profile of different exercises on a novel motor‐cognitive training technology designed to cover a broad range of exercise intensities. Twenty‐six healthy trained adults (17 males, 23.7 ± 3....

Background Age‐related cognitive decline increases the need for cognitive interventions to maintain cognitive function. Cognitive training is considered an effective non‐pharmacological intervention. Transfer of training gains to untrained tasks is a key indicator for the effectiveness of cognitive training. However, the underlying brain mechanisms...

Purpose: While long-term training with stroboscopic eyewear suggests performance-enhancing effects on visuomotor abilities, it remains unclear whether a short-term application, for example, during a warm-up, results in immediate performance gains. This study evaluated potential performance-enhancing effects of stroboscopic eyewear applied during w...

The structural and functional degradation of the corpus callosum (CC) has been shown to play an important role in the context of cognitive aging (Reuter-Lorenz and Stanczak, 2000). This is also reflected by findings of elongated interhemispheric transfer time (IHTT) in older adults (Riedel et al., 2022). At the same time, a protective effect of phy...

Age‐related cognitive decline increase the need for cognitive interventions to maintain cognitive function. Transfer of training gains to untrained tasks is a key indicator for the effectiveness of cognitive training. However, the underlying brain mechanisms need to be further investigated. We implemented a cognitive training study to assess functi...

Stroboscopic training has repeatedly been shown to improve visual and visuomotor performance in sports. Although recent research suggest that stroboscopic vision puts a training stimulus to the central nervous system, the underlying mechanism how it affects motion perception and processing in the brain is still unknown. Twenty‐six participants perf...

Age-related cognitive decline has been attributed to degeneration of the corpus callosum (CC), which allows for interhemispheric integration and information processing [22,69]. Along with decreased structural integrity, altered functional properties of the CC may cause impaired cognitive performance in older adults, yet this aspect of age-related d...

Although vision is the dominating sensory system in sports, many situations require multisensory integration. Faster processing of auditory information in the brain may facilitate time-critical abilities such as reaction speed however previous research was limited by generic auditory and visual stimuli that did not consider audio-visual characteris...

While the resting-state individual alpha frequency (IAF) is related to the cognitive performance and temporal resolution of visual perception, it remains unclear how it affects the neural correlates of visual perception and reaction processes. This study aimed to unravel the relation between IAF, visual perception, and visuomotor reaction time. One...

Background: Normal aging is associated with working memory decline. A decrease in working memory performance is associated with age-related changes in functional activation patterns in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Cognitive training can improve cognitive performance in healthy older adults. We implemented a cognitive training study t...

Cognition emerges from coordinated processing among distributed cortical brain regions, enabled through interconnected white matter networks. Cortical disconnection caused by age-related decline in white matter integrity (WMI) is likely to contribute to age-related cognitive decline. Physical activity (PA) has been suggested to have beneficial effe...

Purpose: Recent research suggests that stroboscopic training is an effective tool to improve visual and visuomotor performance. However, many studies were limited by small samples, short training interventions, inexperienced athletes, and an exclusive focus on short-term effects. This first part of the study evaluates the short- and long-term effe...

Purpose: Stroboscopic training has repeatedly been shown to improve visuomotor abilities. However, although performance improvements were attributed to visual processes, information on the neurophysiological mechanisms is missing. Part 2 of this study investigated the effects of stroboscopic training on neural visual and motor functions and its co...

Although neural visual processes play a crucial role in sport, experiments have been restricted to laboratory conditions lacking ecological validity. Therefore, this study examined the feasibility of measuring visual evoked potentials in a sport-specific visuomotor task. A total of 18 international elite young table tennis athletes (mean age 12.5 y...

The importance of visuomotor reactions in sports is inevitable; however, its assessment using computer-based tests raises the question, if results are transferable to sport-specific situations. Since computer-based simple reaction tests are widely used by sport scientists and practioners, this study examined their relation to sport-specific visuomo...

Purpose: Recent research in adult badminton athletes has shown the visuomotor reaction time (VMRT) is strongly dependent on the speed of visual signal perception and processing in the brain’s visual motion system. However, it remains unclear if this relation can be confirmed for other visuomotor demanding disciplines as well as different age groups...

Background Cognitively healthy older people can increase their performance in cognitive tasks through training. However, training effects are mostly limited to the trained task; thus, training effects only poorly transfer to untrained tasks or other contexts, which contributes to reduced adaptation abilities in aging. Stabilizing transfer capabilit...

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to determine: (1) the relationship between ankle plantarflexor muscle strength and Achilles tendon (AT) biomechanical properties in older female adults, and (2) whether muscle strength asymmetries between the individually dominant and non-dominant legs in the above subject group were accompanied by inter-limb A...

Purpose: Stroboscopic training is suggested to improve visuomotor abilities in sports. However, previous research has primarily been focused on untrained participants and only considered behavioral data. Since visuomotor performance is substantially determined by neural visual processes, this study aimed to examine the effects of stroboscopic trai...

A growing number of studies suggest the phase of ongoing alpha oscillations in the brain influences visual perception. However, it remained largely unconsidered if this is associated with a phase dependence of neurophysiological processes especially in the visual cortex. Therefore, this study investigated the link between the pre-stimulus oscillato...

Przyklenk, A, Aussieker, T, Gutmann, B, Schiffer, T, Brinkmann, C, Strüder, HK, Bloch, W, Mierau, A, and Gehlert, S. Effects of endurance exercise bouts in hypoxia, hyperoxia, and normoxia on mTOR-related protein signaling in human skeletal muscle. J Strength Cond Res XX(X): 000-000, 2018-This study investigated the effects of short-term hypoxia (H...

Many sports require athletes to rapidly transform visual information into a targeted motor response, a process referred to as visuomotor reaction. On the behavioural level, athletes have long been established to achieve faster simple visuomotor reaction times when compared to non-athletes. However, although the superior performance in athletes has...

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of two different exercise interventions in the morning on football-specific components of performance in the afternoon under conditions simulating a competition day. In the morning on 3 experimental days, 12 football players (age 24.1 ± 5.5 years) completed three different preload interventions th...

The plantar flexors play a crucial role in recovery from sudden disturbances to gait. The objective of this study was to investigate whether medium (months) or long-term (years) exercise-induced enhancement of triceps surae (TS) neuromuscular capacities affects older adults' ability to retain improvements in reactive gait stability during perturbed...

Acute physical exercise (APE) induces an increase in the individual alpha peak frequency (iAPF), a cortical parameter associated with neural information processing speed. The aim of this study was to further scrutinize the influence of different APE intensities on post-exercise iAPF as well as its time course after exercise cessation. 95 healthy yo...

The athlete's brain exhibits significant functional adaptations that facilitate visuomotor reaction performance. However, it is currently unclear if the same neurophysiological processes that differentiate athletes from non-athletes also determine performance within a homogeneous group of athletes. This information can provide valuable help for ath...

Identification of module structure in brain functional networks is a promising way to obtain novel insights into neural information processing, as modules correspond to delineated brain regions in which interactions are strongly increased. Tracking of network modules in time-varying brain functional networks is not yet commonly considered in neuros...

In the majority of studies investigating cortical alpha oscillations the alpha frequency is defined as a fixed band thus, neglecting recommendations in the EEG literature to adjust the alpha band according to the individual alpha peak frequency (iAPF). Based on our previous findings indicating exhaustive exercise induces an increase of the post-exe...

Introduction The effect of hypoxia (HY) and hyperoxia (PER) on vascular growth in human skeletal muscle in response to endurance exercise (EN) is still discussed. Thus, this study tested whether endurance exercise in HY, PER and normoxia (NOR) induces different regulation patterns in VEGF and skeletal muscle capillarization. Methods 11 healthy m...

Balance control is a fundamental component of human every day motor activities such as standing or walking, and its impairment is associated with an increased risk of falling. However, in humans the exact neurobiological mechanisms underlying balance control are still unclear. Specifically, although previous studies have identified a number of cort...

Neural populations produce complex oscillatory patterns thought to implement brain function. The dominant rhythm in the healthy adult human brain is formed by alpha oscillations with a typical power peak most commonly found between 9 and 11 Hz. This alpha peak frequency has been repeatedly discussed as a highly heritable and stable neurophysiologic...

We hypothesized short-term endurance exercise (EN) in hypoxia (HY) to exert decreased mitochondrial adaptation, peak oxygen consumption (VO2peak) and peak power output (PPO) compared to EN in normoxia (NOR) and hyperoxia (PER). 11 male subjects performed repeated unipedal cycling EN in HY, PER, and NOR over 4 weeks in a cross-over design. VO2peak,...

The aging musculoskeletal system experiences a general decline in structure and function, characterized by a reduced adaptability to environmental stress.We investigated whether the older human Achilles tendon (AT) demonstrates mechanosensitivity (via biomechanical and morphological adaptations) in response to long-term mechanical loading. Thirty-f...

Introduction: Athletes participating in ball or racquet sports have to respond to visual stimuli under critical time pressure. Previous studies used visual contrast stimuli to determine visual perception and visuomotor reaction in athletes and non-athletes however, especially ball and racquet sports are characterized by motion rather than contrast...

Einleitung/Problemstellung: Es ist unklar, ob die Applikation von Hypoxie (HY) bzw. Hyperoxie (PER) die trainingsinduzierte mitochondriale Anpassung im Vergleich zu Normoxie (NOR) verändert. Studienziel: Untersuchung des Einflusses von NOR, HY und PER auf zelluläre Parameter der Mitochondrienbiogenese sowie molekulare Signalgeber im humanen Skelett...

Oscillatory brain activity is believed to play a central role in neural coding. Accumulating evidence shows that features of these oscillations are highly dynamic: power, frequency and phase fluctuate alongside changes in behavior and task demands. The role and mechanism supporting this variability is however poorly understood. We here analyze a ne...

Introduction: Elite/skilled athletes participating in sports that require the initiation of targeted movements in response to visual cues under critical time pressure typically outperform non-athletes in a visuomotor reaction task. However, the exact physiological mechanisms of this advantage remain unclear. Therefore, this study aimed to determin...

In previous studies, intermanual transfer after gradual and sudden sensorimotor adaptation were compared to find out whether transfer depends on awareness of the nature of the perturbation. The results of these experiments, however, were contradictory. Furthermore, the results of our own recent study suggest that awareness depends on perturbation s...

Balance control is fundamental for most daily motor activities, and its impairment is associated with an increased risk of falling. Growing evidence suggests the human cortex is essentially contributing to the control of standing balance. However, the exact mechanisms remain unclear and need further investigation. In a previous study, we introduced...

In order to determine optimal training parameters for robot-assisted treadmill walking, it is essential to understand how a robotic device interacts with its wearer, and thus, how parameter settings of the device affect locomotor control. The aim of this study was to assess the effect of different levels of guidance force during robot-assisted trea...

The compensation for a sudden balance perturbation, unpracticed and unpredictable in timing and magnitude is accompanied by pronounced postural instability that is suggested to be causal to falls. However, subsequent presentations of an identical perturbation are characterized by a marked decrease of the amplitude of postural reactions; a phenomeno...

To advance gait rehabilitation research it is of great importance to understand the supraspinal control of walking. In this study the temporal and spatial characteristics of averaged electrocortical activity during treadmill walking in healthy subjects was assessed. Electroencephalography data were recorded from 32 scalp locations, averaged across...

The aim of this study was to identify the interrelation between sensorimotor abilities, cognitive performance and individual alpha peak frequency (iAPF), an EEG marker of global architectural and functional properties of the human brain, in healthy preschool children. 25 participants completed a one minute eyes-closed EEG recording, two cognitive t...

Balance is a crucial component in numerous every day activities such as locomotion. Previous research has reported distinct changes in cortical theta activity during transient balance instability. However, there remains little understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying continuous balance control. This study aimed to investigate cortical thet...

Previous research has shown that both acute and chronic physical exercises can induce positive effects on brain function and this is associated with improvements in cognitive performance. However, the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of exercise on cognitive processing are not well understood. This study examined the...

Large populations of synchronously active cortical neurons produce oscillations which can be measured on the surface of the scalp using electroencephalography (EEG). These cortical oscillations can be analysed in the frequency domain. Power in different frequency bands (e.g. delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma) has been shown to correlate with spec...

Introduction: Physical activity is associated with decreased cancer (recurrence) risk and a reduction in treatment-specific side effects. Exercise modulates cytokine expression and shows beneficial effects on cancer patients' immune system. We investigated the following: (i) whether Non-Hodgkin-Lymphoma patients have increased serum macrophage mig...

ABSTRACT To assess the effects of chemoimmunotherapy on post chemotherapy cognitive impairments (PCCI) in B-cell Non-Hodgkin-Lymphoma (NHL) patients, we used objective and subjective measures of cognitive functions in combination with serum parameters and neuroelectric recordings. Self-perceived status of cognition, fatigue and emotional functionin...

The beneficial effects of physical activity on general health and functional capacity are well documented. Animal and human research in the past 15 years provided additional evidence for the positive influence of physical activity on brain plasticity and cognitive function. The present work gives an overview of recent research studying the effects...

Physical exercise is known to induce a range of transient or sustained psychophysiological effects including stress reduction and improvements in cognitive performance. Previous studies in the area have focused on adults and there has been little research on the relationship between physical exercise and brain function in young children. This study...

THIS STUDY AIMED TO EXAMINE EFFECT OF PHYSICAL EXERCISE ON MOTOR TIMING: personal, maximum and "once per second" tapping. The acute effect was examined by comparing the baseline tapping with that after acute exercise in 9 amateur athletes, 8 elite synchronous swimmers and 9 elite biathletes. Then the baseline tapping was compared among athletes of...

We have shown before that subjects exposed to a changed gravitoinertial environment produce exaggerated manual forces. From the observed pattern of findings, we argued that initial forces were exaggerated because of abnormal vestibular activity and peak forces because of degraded proprioceptive feedback. If so, only peak but not initial forces shou...

The purpose of the present experiment was to examine whether the previously observed exaggerated isometric force production in changed-Gz during parabolic flight (Mierau et al. 200829. Mierau , A. , Girgenrath , M. and Bock , O. 2008. Isometric force production during changed-Gz episodes of parabolic flight. European Journal of Applied Physiolog...

The impact of exercise on brain function has gained broad interest. Because hemodynamic and imaging studies are difficult to perform during and after exercise, electroencephalography (EEG) is often the method of choice. Within this study, we aimed 1) to extend prior work examining changes in scalp-recorded brain electrical activity associated with...

An increasing number of studies within the recent years connected physical exercise with changes in brain cortical activity. Most of this data (1) refers to aerobic exercise and (2) does not correlate to psychological parameters although it is well known that exercise has a positive effect on mood. In times where health activities play a major role...

Acute exercise has been shown to exhibit different effects on human sensorimotor behavior; however, the causes and mechanisms of the responses are often not clear. The primary aim of the present study was to determine the effects of incremental running until exhaustion on sensorimotor performance and adaptation in a tracking task. Subjects were ran...

Previous studies showed that changing forces of gravity as they typically occur during parabolic flights might be responsible for adaptional processes of the CNS. However, until now it has not been differentiated between primary influences of weightlessness and secondary influences due to psycho-physiological factors (e.g., physical or mental strai...

Changes of the normal gravitational acceleration are known to affect sensorimotor performance. For example, subjects exposed to three times the normal terrestrial acceleration (+3 Gz) in a centrifuge will produce exaggerated isometric force. The present study compares the effects of high-Gz to that of micro-Gz on isometric force production. Twelve...

In research on human motor skills, it is often desirable to manipulate proprioceptive feedback in order to determine its contribution towards subjects' performance. Here we evaluate an easy-to-use, non-invasive method to temporarily reduce proprioceptive responsiveness. Two physiotherapy vibrators contacted the distal end of the subjects' forearm o...