Having a good listener can improve your brain health, finds study

Spending time with a good listener not only feels great, it may also be key to keeping the brain healthy as people age. The findings of a recent study suggest that supportive social interactions during one’s adulthood are important for their ability to stave off cognitive decline despite brain ageing or neuropathological changes.

In the study published in JAMA Network Open, researchers observed that simply having someone available most or all of the time, whom you can count on to listen to you when you need to talk, is associated with greater cognitive resilience, a measure of your brain’s ability to function better than would be expected for the amount of physical ageing, or diseaserelated changes in the brain.

“We think of cognitive resilience as a buffer to the effects of brain ageing and disease,” says lead researcher Joel Salinas, MD, assistant professor of neurology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. “This study adds to growing evidence that people can take steps, either for themselves or the people they care about most, to increase the odds they’ll slow down cognitive ageing or prevent the development of symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease — something that is all the more important given that we still don’t have a cure for the disease,” she elaborates.

Salinas explains that while the disease usually affects an older population, the results of this study indicate that people younger than 65 would benefit from taking stock of their social support. For every unit of decline in brain volume, individuals in their 40s and 50s with low listener availability had a cognitive age that was almost four years older than those with high listener availability. “These four years can be incredibly precious. Too often we think about how to protect our brain health when we’re much older, after we’ve already lost a lot of time to build brainhealthy habits,” she adds.

To conduct the study, researchers used one of the longest-running and closely monitored community-based cohorts in the US, the Framingham Heart Study (FHS), as the source of their study’s 2,171 participants, with an average age of 63. Each person underwent a brain MRI and cognitive testing. They also shared information about their social support. The cognitive function of those with greater availability of social support was found to be higher relative to their total cerebral volume.

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PHOTO: ISTOCK (FOR REPRESENTATIONAL PURPOSE ONLY) Cultivate a pool of good listeners for better cognitive health, urge researchers