Category: Dementia

Just five hours per week was enough to maintain the gains.

Mental agility can be increased by even a relatively small amount of language learning.

After only a week of study, students show improved attention skills — as well as learning a new language.

People in the study were learning Scottish Gaelic.

They were compared with a group who took a different one-week course that did not involve language.

Improvements were seen across the age range from 18 to 78 among people who took the language course.

Language learners were better able to switch their attention and filter out irrelevant details.

Continuing to learn a new language led to sustained improvements 9 months later, the researchers also found.

Dr Thomas Bak, the study’s first author, said:

“I think there are three important messages from our study: firstly, it is never too late to start a novel mental activity such as learning a new language.

Secondly, even a short intensive course can show beneficial effects on some cognitive functions.

Thirdly, this effect can be maintained through practice.”

Bilingualism is already linked to a whole host of benefits, including more gray matter in vital brain regions.

This is one of a growing number of studies showing the cognitive benefits of learning a second language later in life.

The authors explain that…

“…mental exercise (including bilingualism) can compensate to a certain degree for the effects of cognitive aging as well as for pathological brain processes such as dementia or stroke.”

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Blak et al., 2016).

10 Superb Psychological Advantages of Learning Another Language

Memory problems may not be the first sign of Alzheimer’s.

Difficulty creating mental maps of new surroundings could be the earliest sign of Alzheimer’s, research finds.

The sign is present long before it is possible to clinically diagnose Alzheimer’s.

Dr Denise Head, one of the study’s authors, said:

“These findings suggest that navigational tasks designed to assess a cognitive mapping strategy could represent a powerful new tool for detecting the very earliest Alzheimer’s disease-related changes in cognition.

The spatial navigation task used in this study to assess cognitive map skills was more sensitive at detecting preclinical Alzheimer’s disease than the standard psychometric task of episodic memory.”

The study involved people trying to navigate a maze on a computer.

The maze had a series of different landmarks and wallpaper patterns to aid navigation.

People were tested on how well they could navigate a learned route and how well they created a mental map of the maze.

Dr Head explained the results:

“People with cerebrospinal markers for preclinical Alzheimer’s disease demonstrated significant difficulties only when they had to form a cognitive map of the environment — an allocentric, place-learning navigation process associated with hippocampal function.

This same preclinical Alzheimer’s disease group showed little or no impairment on route learning tasks — an egocentric navigation process more closely associated with caudate function.”

Study participants with preclinical Alzheimer’s also found it harder to learn the locations of objects in the maze.

Dr Head concluded:

“These findings suggest that navigational tasks designed to assess a cognitive mapping strategy could represent a powerful tool for detecting the very earliest Alzheimer’s disease-related changes in cognition.”

The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (Allison et al., 2016).

Those with the highest levels of calories burned saw a 50% reduction in their risk of Alzheimer’s.

Almost any type of physical activity that makes your heart pump can reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s, new research finds.

The more calories people burned during aerobic activity, the lower their risk of Alzheimer’s, the scientists found.

There were 15 leisure-time activities measured in the study:

• Swimming,
• hiking,
• aerobics,
• jogging,
• tennis,
• racquetball,
• walking,
• gardening,
• mowing,
• raking,
• golfing,
• bicycling,
• dancing,
• calisthenics,
• and riding an exercise cycle.

The study involved 876 people at four different locations in the US.

The average age was 78 and all were followed up over 30 years.

Those with the highest levels of calories burned saw a 50% reduction in their risk of Alzheimer’s.

The study’s authors write:

“…approximately 13% of AD [Alzheimer’s Disease] cases worldwide may be attributable to sedentary behavior.

A 25% reduction in sedentary behavior could potentially prevent more than 1 million AD cases globally.”

Brain scans also revealed that those exercising more had larger volumes in the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes including the hippocampus (the brain’s memory centre).

Dr Cyrus A. Raji, the study’s first author, said:

“This is the first study in which we have been able to correlate the predictive benefit of different kinds of physical activity with the reduction of Alzheimer’s risk through specific relationships with better brain volume in such a large sample.”

Professor George Perry, Editor of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, said:

“Currently the greatest promise in Alzheimer’s disease research is lifestyle intervention including increased exercise.

[This is] a landmark study that links exercise to increases in grey mater and opens the field of lifestyle intervention to objective biological measurement.”

The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (Raji et al., 2016).

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Gray matter ageing slowed significantly by these two factors.

Staying in school and taking the stairs are two things that can help keep your brain young, new research finds.

The more years of school a person completes, the younger their brain appears.

Brain age decreases almost one year for each additional year of education.

For each flight of stairs climbed daily, brain age decreases by just over half a year.

Dr Jason Steffener, the study’s first author, said:

“There already exist many ‘Take the stairs’ campaigns in office environments and public transportation centres.

This study shows that these campaigns should also be expanded for older adults, so that they can work to keep their brains young.”

The research used brain imaging of 331 adults to reach these conclusions.

They looked at any gray matter loss and their education and exercise levels.

Dr Steffener said:

“This study shows that education and physical activity affect the difference between a physiological prediction of age and chronological age, and that people can actively do something to help their brains stay young.

In comparison to many other forms of physical activity, taking the stairs is something most older adults can and already do at least once a day, unlike vigorous forms of physical activity.

This is encouraging because it demonstrates that a simple thing like climbing stairs has great potential as an intervention tool to promote brain health.”

The study was published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging (Steffener et al., 2016).

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The snake venom originally came from a pit viper, which is found in South and Central America.

A drug contained in snake oil may help in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease.

The drug may help the body’s natural defences against the build-up of amyloid plaques in the brain.

Amyloid plaques are lumps of protein which are usually kept in check by enzymes.

In people with Alzheimer’s, though, these enzymes do not do their job.

The molecule, which was discovered in snake venom, could help activate the enzymes and break down the plaques.

The snake venom originally came from a pit viper, which is found in South and Central America.

This is the result of a long search stretching back years by Dr Sanjaya Kuruppu.

The scientists have now developed a synthetic version and found that it works on human cells in the lab.

Although it might sound unusual, snake venoms are actually a common inspiration for pharmaceutical research.

The study was published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports (Smith et al., 2016).

Alzheimer’s image from Shutterstock

New research examines whether the diagnostic label of ‘dementia’ really helps people.

People who see symptoms of dementia as a normal part of getting older feel more positive, a new study finds.

The research looked at 64 people who had recently been diagnosed with mild to moderate dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.

They were having problems concentrating, with memory loss as well as difficulty carrying out everyday tasks.

Those who saw these problems as an ‘illness’ reported lower mood than those who saw it as a part of the process of ageing.

Researchers analysed people in the study on the basis of three groups or ‘clusters’, as they explain:

“‘Illness’ cluster participants saw themselves as living with an illness and used diagnostic labels, ‘ageing’ cluster participants did not use diagnostic labels and viewed their difficulties as related to ageing, and ‘no problem’ cluster participants considered that they did not have any difficulties.

‘Illness’ cluster participants had better cognition and better awareness, but lower mood, and perceived more practical consequences, than ‘ageing’ cluster participants.

Holding an ‘illness’ model may not be advantageous.”

Around two-thirds of those diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer’s did not see themselves as ill.

Instead they thought of their symptoms as being part of the ageing process.

Professor Linda Clare, who led the study, said:

“There’s a big emphasis on earlier diagnosis of dementia, but our evidence raises the crucial question of the extent to which giving a diagnostic label really benefits people.

Some people do want their difficulties acknowledged with a diagnosis, but our research shows that many others understand what is happening to them as part of a normal process of ageing.

For this group, we may be better targeting support and information based on their symptoms or the type of everyday difficulties they are having, rather than focusing on giving a diagnostic label.

This is a relatively small study and we must now conduct further work to confirm this to ensure we are providing the best support in this crucial area of health diagnosis, which has enormous implications for how people adjust and cope with these changes in later life.”

The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (Clare et al., 2016).

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Over 3,000 people had their personality, memory and thinking skills measured across 25 years.

Young adults who are hostile or aggressive and find it difficult to deal with stress have worse memory and thinking skills later on, a study finds.

The study surveyed 3,126 people who were asked about their:

• personality,
• attitudes,
• memory and thinking skills,
• aggressive behaviours and any trust issues,
• as well as how they coped with stress.

People were asked first when they were around around 25-years-old and then followed up when they were around 50.

Dr Lenore J. Launer, one of the study’s authors, said:

“We may not think of our personality traits as having any bearing on how well we think or remember things, but we found that the effect of having a hostile attitude and poor coping skills on thinking ability was similar to the effect of more than a decade of aging.”

The results showed that those with the highest levels of hostility performed the worst on tests of memory and thinking skills.

The study only shows a link between hostility and poor cognitive skills, not necessarily that one causes the other.

Dr Launer said:

“If this link is found in other studies, it will be important to understand whether these personality traits are amenable to change that would lead to interventions that promote positive social interactions and coping skills to see if they could play a role in reducing people’s risk for memory and thinking problems in middle age.”

The study was published in the journal Neurology (White et al., 2016).

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They could slow the ageing process and delay the onset of debilitating cognitive symptoms.

Blueberries, strawberries and walnuts could help protect the brain from the consequences of ageing, new research finds.

The antioxidants in both can help fight age-related changes in the brain like the loss of synapses.

Dr James Joseph, who led the research on walnuts, said:

“The good news, is that it appears that compounds found in fruits and vegetables — and, as we have shown in our research, walnuts — may provide the necessary protection to prevent the demise of cognitive and motor function in aging.”

Dr Joseph’s study involved feeding older rats with varying amounts of walnuts.

The research found that the walnuts helped to reduce both cognitive and motor problems that the mice had naturally developed with age.

Dr Joseph said:

“Importantly, this information, coupled with our previous studies, shows that the addition of walnuts, berries, and grape juice to the diet may increase ‘health span’ in aging and provide a ‘longevity dividend’ or economic benefit for slowing the aging process by reducing the incidence and delaying the onset of debilitating degenerative disease.”

The study was published in the journal The Journal of Nutrition (Joseph et al., 2009).

Image credit: Liz Jones

Scientists studied 250 people with mild cognitive impairment: a condition that can progress to dementia.

B vitamins combined with omega-3 can help slow mental decline in older people with memory problems, a new study finds.

Dr Celeste de Jager, one of the study’s authors, said:

“We previously found that B vitamins are able to slow or prevent the atrophy of the brain and memory decline in people with MCI.

This was most effective in those who had above average blood levels of homocysteine, a factor related to B vitamin status that may be toxic to the brain.

Scientists in our team initially found that there was a link between Omega-3 levels, homocysteine, and brain atrophy rates.

We wanted to find out whether Omega-3 and B vitamins might interact to prevent cognitive decline.”

The scientists studied 250 people with mild cognitive impairment.

This condition can progress to dementia.

The study’s first author, Dr Abderrahim Oulhaj explained the results:

‘We found that for people with low levels of Omega-3, the vitamin supplements had little to no effect.

But for those with high baseline Omega-3 levels, the B vitamins were very effective in preventing cognitive decline compared to the placebo.

This result complements our previous finding that B vitamins slow the rate of brain atrophy in MCI only in those with a good Omega-3 level to start with.”

Dr Doug Brown, Director of Research and Development at Alzheimer’s Society said:

‘These results help us to tease apart who could benefit from taking B vitamins, suggesting that they might only improve cognition in people who have high levels of Omega-3 oils in their blood.

Encouragingly, these findings suggest that for some older people a combination of fish oil supplements and B vitamins may help to improve thinking and memory.

As this study shows, the relationship between nutrition and brain health is complex and we need to see increased research efforts to help us understand the role that diet and nutrition can play in reducing a person’s risk of dementia.”

The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (Oulhaj et al., 2016).

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Plus four food types linked to higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

People who eat more nuts, fish, poultry and certain fruits and vegetables have a lower risk of Alzheimer’s, research finds.

Set against this, those who eat more red meats, organ meats, butter and high-fat dairy products have a higher risk of Alzheimer’s.

The conclusions come from a study of 2,148 adults aged over 65 published in the journal Archives of Neurology.

All lived in New York and did not have dementia.

They were followed over a period of around four years.

Their diet was studied and their dementia risk assessed every 1.5 years.

253 people had developed Alzheimer’s at follow-up.

However, one dietary pattern apparently provided the best protection against the disease.

Those who had a higher intake of the following had a lower risk of Alzheimer’s:

• salad dressing,
• nuts,
• fish,
• tomatoes,
• poultry,
• fruits,
• and cruciferous and dark and green leafy vegetables, like cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli.

The study’s authors write:

“Epidemiological evidence linking diet, one of the most important modifiable environmental factors, and risk of Alzheimer’s disease is rapidly increasing.

However, current literature regarding the impact of individual nutrients or food items on Alzheimer’s disease risk is inconsistent, partly because humans eat meals with complex combinations of nutrients or food items that are likely to be synergistic.”

The dietary benefits are likely related to essential vitamins and minerals.

The study’s authors write:

“For example, vitamin B12 and folate are homocysteine-related vitamins that may have an impact on Alzheimer’s disease via their ability of reducing circulating homocysteine levels, vitamin E might prevent Alzheimer’s disease via its strong antioxidant effect and fatty acids may be related to dementia and cognitive function through atherosclerosis, thrombosis or inflammation via an effect on brain development and membrane functioning or via accumulation of beta-amyloid.”

Alzheimer’s photo from Shutterstock