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Head Games: Brain Push-Ups Prevent Dementia

By Christine Haran

Everyone knows that regular exercise can help keep the body in good shape. But many assume that there's nothing they can do about becoming forgetful in their old age. Now, evidence suggests that older people can preserve their mental acuity by exercising their brains.

Dr. Joe Verghese is an assistant professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the lead author of a recent New England Journal of Medicine study on the impact of leisure activities on dementia in the elderly. As part of the Einstein Aging Study, he and his colleagues followed a group of about 500 subjects over a 21-year period. The participants were between 75 and 85 years of age when they joined the study. The researchers interviewed them about their leisure activities, including their mental activities, such as board games or reading, as well as their physical activities. They found that people who participated in mental activities had a reduced risk of dementia.

Below, Dr. Verghese discusses how leisure activity that involves some mental effort might protect older people from dementia.

Why did you decide to examine the relationship between leisure activity and dementia in the elderly?
There's been a great deal of interest about the so-called "use it or lose it" theory in cognitive aging. Generally what we do in dementia research is look for risk factors associated with developing dementia, things that are bad. Cognitive activities, on the other hand, seem to have a positive effect on preventing dementia, so that's one of the things that drew me to it.

What type of dementia did you look at specifically?
We looked at all types of dementia. Most dementia in the elderly is due to Alzheimer's disease, which starts with memory complaints in people in their 60s and 70s. We also looked at vascular dementia, which occurs as a result of strokes or poor circulation to the brain, as well as dementias associated with Parkinson's disease.

How would you define dementia?
Dementia is defined as severe memory impairment and impairment in other cognitive functions like planning, judgment, problem solving or language. And these impairments have to be severe enough to impact on one's daily functioning.

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