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Fending Off Mental Aging

A flurry of recent research suggests that there may be ways to improve our odds of preventing Alzheimer's or age-related mental decline through diet and life-style. Here's a look at some of the promising findings.

Mental Exercises for Brain Gain

Lead researchers from Pennsylvania State University report that mental exercise may play a key role in staving off age-related loss of mental agility (1). The research team divided the 2,800+ subjects aged 65 and older into four groups of roughly 700 to receive training in either memory, reasoning or speed of processing, and a control group that received no instruction. Memory training consisted of strategies to remember word lists or texts, such as associating various words, visualizing them or organizing them in specific ways. Reasoning training taught subjects how to spot the pattern in a series of letters or numbers. Processing speed was enhanced by repeated practice in identifying an object on a screen after increasingly shorter visual exposures.

Training Yields Long Term Improvements

Participants were asked to appraise their own skills, and indicate whether the training helped with every-day tasks. Practical skills like finding items in a medicine cabinet were also independently evaluated by the scientists. After training, 87% of the speed trainees, 74% of the reason trainees and 26% of the memory trainees showed immediate improvement.

That advantage over their untrained peers persisted over the next 5 years. Compared to controls, the memory group, for example, was able to remember about 3-4 more words from a list of 12-15. Some who got refresher training 1and 3 years after the initial instruction performed best of all, especially those in the speed-processing group. Tasks like making change for a purchase or reading medication labels were performed more quickly and efficiently.

Most impressively, the training seemed to largely offset the cognitive decline experienced by nearly ½ of the control subjects. By the end of 5 years, a significant gap had opened between those in the instruction groups and controls. According to one of the study's authors, "to drive this effect, you have to practice things you don't necessary like or things you don't regularly practice". In other words, it may not be quite as simple as doing crossword or sudoku puzzles. In the future, the authors hope to make these training programs more widely available. It's not hard to envision mental exercise programs in senior centers nationwide to help prevent mind decline as we age.

Dietary Strategies for Brain Fitness

Research shows that brain levels of DHA decrease with age, and that getting more DHA later in life increases brain content. The December, 2006 issue of Staying Healthy describes a Tufts study which links higher blood levels or intake of DHA (from fish) to a significantly lower risk of Alzheimer's and dementia. A second double-blind study from Sweden found that omega-3 supplements slowed mental decline in people with very mild Alzheimer's, though the group with mild disease was small and no effect was seen in people with more advanced forms (2). In addition, a small study from Japan reports improvements in immediate memory and attention in patients with mild cognitive impairment after taking DHA and arachidonic acid supplements (vs. placebo) for 3 months (3).

Since the Mediterranean diet is abundant in seafood, it's no surprise that it would also show promise in protecting mental function. But that diet's potential benefits may extend beyond its fish content. Scientists report that subjects most closely following a "Med" style diet consisting mostly of vegetables, legumes, fruits, cereals and some fish were almost 40% less likely to develop Alzheimer's than those with the poorest adherence (see the August, 2006 issue).

Lastly, a series of studies conducted at Tufts have shown that diets enriched with antioxidant-rich blueberries, strawberries, cranberries or grape juice can reduce or reverse declines in brain function in laboratory animals.

References

1. Willis SL, et al. Long-term effects of cognitive training on everyday function outcomes in older adults. JAMA 296:2805-14, 2006.
2. Freund-Levi Y, et al. Omega-3 fatty acid treatment in 174 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer disease: OmegAD Study. Arch Neurol 63:1402-8, 2006.
3. Kotani S, et al. Dietary supplementation of arachidonic and docosahexaenoic acids improves cognitive dysfunction. Neurosci Res 56:159-64, 2006.