Is it possible to make personal changes to stave off dementia and preserve independence? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Showing someone a visual task on a computer and then speeding things up so they must complete it faster and faster preserves brain function better than other forms of training over twenty years of follow up. That’s according to a new study by Marilyn Albert, an Alzheimer’s disease expert at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues. Only in the latter ten years did differences in training impact show up.

Albert: When the study started the goal was to see if different kinds of cognitive training could generalize to improve independent activities of daily living. Everybody knew that if you practiced on certain kinds of tasks you could get better on them but the question was whether or not you would have more independence in daily living. What the study found at 10 years was that all of the different kinds of training did generalize compared to a control group.   :29

At twenty years the clear winner is the speed training, Albert concludes. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.