Recruiting adaptive cellular stress responses for successful brain ageing

This summary from the Dana foundation is much clearer than the abstract. I'm not sure how to use this information but we need more studies on it for stroke rehab.

Several studies have demonstrated that regular exercise helps protect the brain from age-related decline.  But in a recent essay published in the March 2012 issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Mark Mattson, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Aging, argues that diet is just as important.  Specifically, he cites results demonstrating that intermittent fasting—one day on food, the next day off of it—can also protect the brain.  So why might abstaining from food every 24 hours be such a brain benefit?
“Fasting is a challenge to the nervous system, to the energy regulating systems,” says Mattson.  “And what we’re thinking, from the standpoint of evolution, is that animals living in the wild, including our ancestors, often had to go extended time periods without food.  If you haven’t had food for a while, your mind becomes more active—it has to become very active, to help you figure out how to find food.”
That activity manifests itself in neuroplasticity; in mouse models, Mattson and colleagues have shown that intermittent fasting helps protect the brain from both oxidative stress and direct injury.  Those protective effects result in the upregulation of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) as well as anti-oxidants, DNA-repair enzymes, and other gene products that help promote plasticity and survival of neurons over time.
“It makes evolutionary sense that caloric availability would have an impact, not just on brain regions involved in metabolism, such as the hypothalamus, but also on brain regions involved in learning, such as the hippocampus,” says Alexis Stranahan, a professor at Georgia Health Sciences University and Mattson’s co-author on the Nature Reviews Neuroscience essay.  “Your mind needs to be sharp if you are looking for food.  At the other end of the spectrum, it also makes sense that an overabundance of food would dull the senses, making it harder to form associations.”
In the past, some studies suggested that caloric restriction promoted good health—and researchers have seen improved outcomes in animal models of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, stroke and Huntington’s disease by simply reducing the number of calories an animal eats each day by a significant percentage.  But Mattson argues that, when it comes to the brain, fasting may be more effective.  “We find that the intermittent fasting increases neurogenesis while limited daily reduction in calories has very little effect,” he says.  “BDNF levels are increased in response to both exercise and intermittent energy restriction.”
Abstract here:
 http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v13/n3/abs/nrn3151.html
No self-medication here.