These studies are showing the on-set of Alzheimer’s or dementia being delayed up to 10 years.
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Toronto researchers found that socially active people with higher education, plus mentally stimulating work, were protected from age-related brain decline, even if they ate a bad diet that increased their risk for dementia.
The training is actually available online in a commercial program by Brain HQ called the Double Decision Exercise (which licensed the training from the researchers who created it).
Ozioma Okonkwo, senior author on the study and assistant professor at the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, said that, “The brain is like a muscle”.
“Until now, there hasn’t been a good way to measure it”, said Keith Fargo, director of scientific programs and outreach for the Alzheimer’s Association.
The other two studies also discovered that working a person’s brain, whether at work or at play, can somehow build a tougher defense against dementia.
In another study, a group based at the University of Wisconsin’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center in Madison found that even among people with complex jobs, those that primarily worked with people rather than data or things were better able to cope with the damage to brain tissue associated with the disease. “We’re starting to figure out what might be in the recipe, and at this point we still don’t know what’s going to be beneficial for the most number of individuals”.
The research team from the University College of London Institute of Ophthalmology, Topcon Advanced Biomedical Imaging Laboratory in Oakland, New Jersey, and the University of Oxford, found that individuals who showed an abnormal cognitive test had a thinner RNFL than those who had normal cognitive tests.
Talking about Alzheimer’s Ismail said, “People often think [Alzheimer’s] is all about memory loss but it is not”. For example, it could mean that people who are at a lower risk for Alzheimer’s simply tend to go for intellectual jobs.
In another study, researchers investigated the interplay between diet, intellectual stimulation and brain health. There’s also an app people can use on a phone or iPad. A diet of red and processed meats, white bread and potatoes, pre-packaged food and candies was associated with cognitive decline, the study showed.
“From a research perspective”, he adds, “the scale may prove to be usable in biomarker and neuroimaging studies in pre‐dementia clinical states, in epidemiological studies of community samples, and in clinical sample observational studies to help assess the impact of NPS in older adults”.
Divided into three groups, one group was assigned to take memory improvement exercises; the second group underwent drills for reasoning; and the third group took computer-based training for their speed of processing.
After 10 years, 33 per cent fewer of those who received the initial training developed dementia compared with a control group who received no training. The other two training groups did not show a significant difference from the control group.
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Speed training is created to improve the speed and accuracy of processing visual information and expand the useful field of view, or UFOV-the visual area over which a person can make quick decisions and pay attention without moving the eye or head. The researchers were led by Jerri Edwards, from the University of South Florida, and the results were presented at the Alzheimer’s Association annual meeting on Sunday. “Next, we’d like to get a better grasp on what exactly is the right amount of cognitive training to get the optimal benefits”.
