Spring Arbor Living Blog

As you age, make time for games, puzzles, and handicrafts.  

A new study published in BMC Medicine shows that these activities reduce the risk, and help slow down the progress of dementia in healthy elderly people.

The study revealed that healthy older adults were able to improve specific skills, such as reasoning, memory, language and hand-eye coordination with cognitive training.

Estimates show that by 2050 the number of people over 65 years old will have increased to 1.1 billion worldwide, and that 37 million of these will have dementia.
 
Previous research has shown that mental activity can lower a person’s risk of dementia, but the effect of cognitive training on healthy people is less well understood. To investigate this further, researchers from China studied the use of cognitive training as protection against mental decline for healthy elderly people who live independently.

Study participants were between the ages of 65 and 75 years old. For 12 weeks, the training sessions were an hour long, twice a week, and the subjects were given homework.

Training included a multiple approach system that tested memory, reasoning, problem solving, map reading, handicrafts, health education and exercise, or focused on reasoning only. “Booster training” was also  provided six months later.

“Compared to the control group, who received no training, both levels of cognitive training improved mental ability, although the multifaceted training had more of a long term effect. The more detailed training also improved memory, even when measured a year later and booster training had an additional improvement on mental ability scores,” said research leaders Chunbo Li and Wenyuan Wu.

The findings show that cognitive training may prevent mental decline in healthy older people and help them live independently as they continue to age.

Psych Central

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Carrying around extra pounds during middle age was associated with a higher risk of dementia later in life in a new study that followed twins in Sweden for 30 years.

The research was not set up to prove that dementia was caused by the added weight, but Dr. Weili Xu, the study's lead author, said that the evidence is pointing in that direction.

The findings suggest that "control of body fat as early as middle life is important to prevent dementia later in life," she told Reuters Health.

Xu and her colleagues analyzed data from close to 9,000 Swedish twins.

When the participants were an average age of 43, they gave researchers information about their height and weight.

Thirty years later, the researchers examined the same individuals for signs of declining thinking and memory skills, and then diagnosed some of them with Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia.

Close to one in three of the participants were overweight or obese in middle age. And those that were had about an 80 percent higher chance of getting any kind of dementia than people of normal weight.

The more participants weighed in mid-life, the higher their chance of getting dementia or "questionable dementia" - meaning they had signs of thinking and reasoning problems, but not enough to be diagnosed with dementia.

In total, about 4 percent of everyone in the study was diagnosed with dementia, and another 1 to 2 percent with questionable dementia.

Despite the link between excess pounds in midlife and later dementia, when the researchers looked specifically at 137 twin pairs who were "discordant" - one twin had dementia and the other didn't - the tie to midlife overweight shrank considerably.

While Xu said that finding suggests that "there are some common genes that predispose (people) to both diseases (overweight and dementia)," it could also be that it was just more difficult to establish a solid link in such a small sample.

Whether genes predispose a person to being overweight in adulthood, or it's just bad eating habits, the likely explanation for the link to dementia is that fat tissue in the body releases hormones and other signaling cells that may affect the brain's functioning.

In addition, extra weight has been shown to increase a person's risk for diabetes and heart and blood vessel diseases - and those conditions are related to a higher dementia risk. However, the link between weight and dementia remained even after the researchers took other diseases into account.

The findings are the latest evidence that preventing Alzheimer's disease and dementia starts long before their signs and symptoms show up.

"People need to understand that what they do today could have an effect on them 30 or 40 years from now.”
When it comes to maintaining a healthy weight, what's good for the heart is good for the brain.

Original article - MSN

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