Could new ‘brain training’ program help prevent dementia?

In what is being billed as a first, researchers report that healthy seniors who tried a new brain-training program were less likely to develop dementia down the road.
According to the report in the November issue of HealthDay News, the program, called BrainHQ, tries to speed thinking by giving seniors the task of distinguishing between a series of ever-changing objects on a computer screen—both in the center and periphery of their vision. Over time, the objects appear more quickly, and look more similar to one another. This makes the task increasingly difficult, with the aim being to boost the individual’s ability to rapidly and accurately identify the objects at hand.
Based on tracking more than 2,800 seniors, the team found that it appears to do just that. Over a 10-year period, the speed-of-thought-processing program lowered dementia risk by nearly 30 percent, the study team said, when compared with seniors who didn’t have such training.
In the study, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, dementia-free seniors (all aged 65 and up) were divided into four groups.
One group received no brain training of any kind. Over a six-week period, three other groups underwent at least 10 sessions of different types of brain training that lasted 60 to 75 minutes each. Some participants received additional training sessions beyond the initial six weeks.
One group was offered strategic advice on how to improve their verbal memory skills, while a second group was offered strategies on improving their capacity to reason and problem-solve. The third group, however, underwent the computerized speed-of-thought-processing program.
In the end, investigators determined that neither memory training nor reason training appeared to lower long-term dementia risk. But speed-of-thought-processing training appeared to cause dementia risk to fall by 29 percent over a decade. What’s more, the more speed training sessions a senior got under his or her belt, the lower their dementia risk was going forward.
In fact, among those seniors who completed 15 or more such sessions, the 10-year risk for dementia was pegged at just 5.9 percent. This compared with a roughly 10 percent risk seen among those who underwent either memory or reason training. Those who underwent no training of any kind had a nearly 11 percent risk.
The study was published Nov. 16 in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions.
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