Brain training reduces dementia risk, study says

A simple brain-training exercise could reduce people’s risk of developing dementia by 25 percent, a study has found. A simple brain-training exercise could reduce people’s risk of developing dementia by 25 percent, a study said this week, but with outside researchers expressing caution in interpreting the results. There are vast amounts of brain-training games and apps which claim to fight off cognitive decline, although there has been little high-quality, long-term research proving their effectiveness.

The new study is a randomised controlled trial — considered the gold standard for medical research — which first began enrolling participants in the late 1990s. More than 2,800 people aged 65 or older were randomly assigned one of three different types of brain training — speed, memory, or reasoning — or were part of a control group. First, the participants did an hour-long training session twice a week for five weeks.

One and three years later, they did four booster sessions. In total, there were fewer than 24 hours of training. During follow-ups after five, 10 and most recently 20 years, the speed training was always “disproportionately beneficial”, study co-author Marilyn Albert of Johns Hopkins University in the United States told AFP.

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After two decades, Medicare records showed that the people who did the speed-training and booster sessions had a 25-percent reduced risk of getting dementia, according to the study. The other two types of training did not make a statistically significant difference. “For the first time, this is a gold-standard study that’s given us an idea of what we can do to reduce risk for developing dementia,” Albert said.

However Rachel Richardson, a researcher at the Cochrane Collaboration not involved in the study, cautioned that “while statistically significant, the result may not be as impressive” as a 25-percent reduction. This is partly because the margins of error “range from a reduction of 41 percent to one of only five percent”, she told the Science Media Centre.

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