Brain training may forestall dementia
If you’re intent on keeping dementia at bay, new research suggests you’ll need more than crossword puzzles, aerobic exercise and an active social life.
Researchers found that older adults who did exercises to shore up the speed at which they processed visual information could cut by nearly half their likelihood of cognitive decline or dementia over a 10-year period.
The new clinical trial results, presented at the Alzheimer’s Association’s International Conference in Toronto, establish specialized brain training as a potentially powerful strategy to prevent Alzheimer’s disease and other afflictions, including normal aging, that sap memory and reduce function.
With millions of baby boomers reaching the age of maximum vulnerability to Alzheimer’s, and with no effective treatments available to alter the disease’s progression, researchers are keen to find ways to prevent or delay the onset of the memory-robbing disease.
The new research suggests that even years after it is administered, an inexpensive intervention without unwanted side effects might forestall dementia symptoms.
The latest results emerged from a 10-year study that compared the effects of three forms of brain training in a group of 2,802 cognitively healthy seniors. The ACTIVE study — short for Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly — was funded by the U.S. National Institute on Aging.
A quarter of the participants, who had an average age of 73.4 at the study’s start, got no training at all. The remaining participants were divided into three groups. Over five weeks, each group got 10 hour-long training sessions. One group got a classroom-based course designed to impart strategies aimed at boosting memory, while a second got a classroom-based course designed to sharpen participants’ reasoning skills.
A third group was given computerized training designed to increase the speed at which the brain picks up and processes cues in a person’s field of vision. Speed of visual processing declines with age, a trend that some neuroscientists attribute to the increasing “noise” in electrical communications between cells and among regions in the brain.
Over the study’s 10-year followup, 14 per cent of participants in the control group suffered significant cognitive decline or dementia, compared with 11.4 per cent in the memory-strategies training group, 11.7 per cent in the reasoning-strategies training group and 10.5 per cent in the speed-of-processing group. Cognitive decline or dementia was not only less among those in the speed-of-processing group — when it appeared, it came later.
Statistically, the trial’s four groups experienced sizable differences in cognitive aging. For those who got the commercially available brain-training exercises, the cumulative risk of developing cognitive decline or dementia over 10 years was 33 per cent lower than for participants who got no training at all. Among a smaller group of computerized-training participants who got “booster sessions,” the risk of cognitive decline or dementia went down even further. Compared with study participants who got no training at all, recruits who went through more than 10 of the computerized brain-training sessions were 48 per cent less likely over 10 years to experience dementia or cognitive decline.
Participants who took part in the other two training regimens, which focused on teaching strategies for remembering and for reasoning, were as a group slightly less likely than the control group to suffer cognitive decline or dementia over the study’s 10-year span. That was particularly true for those who got 10 sessions to improve reasoning-strategies. But the results of those training regimens were less robust than those for the computerized training, and researchers could not rule out the possibility they were caused by chance.
University of South Florida associate professor Jerri Edwards, first author of the new study, said its findings appear to be a milestone — “the first time a cognitive training intervention has been shown to protect against cognitive impairment or dementia in a large, randomized, controlled trial.”
Among the study’s most intriguing findings, said Edwards, was the suggestion that, with continued brain training — an increased dose — older people might further boost their protection against dementia.
“Next,” she said, “we’d like to get a better grasp on what exactly is the right amount of cognitive training to get the optimal benefits.”