“For Alzheimer’s disease, we now have four FDA-approved drugs and more effective treatments are on the way”.
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But Dr King said it was unclear whether speed training would help people who are already at risk for dementia.
Among participants in the computerized group, risk for cognitive decline or dementia declined by 33 percent, with those who said yes to booster sessions showed as much as a 48-percent reduction in developing the conditions.
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. This was especially true for those who got 10 sessions to improve reasoning strategies.
“Most people think of Alzheimer’s as primarily a memory disorder, but we do know… that it also can start as a behavioral issue”, says the director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Centers program at the National Institute on Aging, who wasn’t involved in developing the checklist, but advocates it.
The computerised brain-training exercise is commercially available as the “Double Decision” game, one of a suite of cognitive exercises marketed online by the San Francisco-based Posit Science Corp.
Brain training with simple and entertaining online games can cut the risk of dementia by a third according to a scientific breakthrough which experts have described as “spectacular”.
The study’s lead author, Melissa Murray, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Mayo Clinic, said that researchers were able to collect data from a fairly large brain bank that provided insight into an entire community of people with Alzheimer’s dementia. The game exercises an individual’s ability to detect, remember and respond to cues that appear and disappear quickly in varying locations on a computer screen.
“These analyses underscore the importance of social engagement in the work setting for building resilience to Alzheimer’s disease”, Boots said in a press release from the Alzheimer’s Association. An example would be when a grandparent seems to lose interest in her grandchildren’s lives, Ismail said. As we’ve heard at AAIC this year, formal education and complex occupation could potentially do more than just slow cognitive decline – they may actually help compensate for the cognitive damage done by bad diet and small vessel disease in the brain.
“[In those with Alzheimer’s] men in their 60s were overrepresented”, she said, meaning a higher number men were affected in that age group than was expected by researchers. A decade later, that reaction-time training suggested benefit: 12 percent of people whod completed up to 10 hours had evidence of cognitive decline or dementia compared with 14 percent in the control group, said Dr. Jerri Edwards of the University of South Florida.
The Alzheimer’s diagnosis is usually based on mild cognitive impairment, but researchers are now focusing on mild behavioral impairment as an early indication of the disease.
Researchers also presented results from two studies outlining the use of apparent changes in and around the eye in identifying patients with Alzheimer’s.
Those with a thinner layer of neurons were more likely to perform poorly on cognitive tests – which could indicate the early stages of dementia.
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The brains of people whose work involves complex social interactions are best at weathering the ravages of aging, including Alzheimer’s disease.
