On the subject of seniors staving off dementia by staying mentally active, there is good news and bad news, according to new research published this month by Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.
Exercising your mind with activities such as reading a newspaper, going to a museum, solving crossword puzzles or playing chess does help slow or prevent the development of dementia, just as we've been told for the past several years. But new evidence shows that once dementia begins, that same mentally stimulating lifestyle that helped keep dementia at bay can cause the disease to progress much more quickly.
For the study, researchers recruited 1,157 people who were 65 and older--all free of dementia--from the same Chicago neighborhood, asked them how often they participated in mentally stimulating activities, and gave each person a score on a cognitive activity scale. The more frequently people exercised their minds with stimulating activities, the higher their score.
More than a decade later, researchers found that for seniors who didn't have dementia the rate of cognitive decline was reduced by 52 percent for each point on the cognitive activity scale. For those who had developed Alzheimer's disease during the previous decade, however, the average rate of cognitive decline per year increased 42 percent for every point on the cognitive activity scale.
One theory to come out of the research study is that people who are mentally active over a long period build up what researchers call a "cognitive reserve." So when dementia starts to disrupt or damage one network in their brains, they can engage other networks to solve problems or do tasks. As a result, it may take many more years for symptoms of the disease to become apparent in people who are mentally active. Once the symptoms do appear, the disease seems to move more quickly than in other people because it has been disguised for so long.
Yet even that seemingly dark cloud has a silver lining, according to Robert Wilson, a professor of neurological sciences at Rush University, who led the study, because it means that mentally stimulating activity preserves and extends a person's cognitive independence as long as possible.
"Mental activities compress the time period that a person spends with dementia, delaying its start and then speeding up its progress," Wilson said in the Rush University Medical Center announcement. "This reduces the overall amount of time that a person may suffer from dementia. And that's a good thing."
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