If you’re looking to preserve brain health doing cognitive speed training may be best, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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If you’re like many people you’d rather not develop dementia, so a new study demonstrating the benefits of a computer based intervention called cognitive speed training may interest you. Marilyn Albert, study author and Alzheimer’s disease expert at Johns Hopkins, explains.

Albert: We've known for a really long time that being mentally active likely lowers your risk for dementia. What this study is telling us is that it probably is important to do certain kinds of activities that would stimulate their brain that might last over a long time. What's particularly good is that the training was quite modest. People did a task for an hour twice a week for about 5 or 6 weeks. A year later they did the same task for about four weeks and again after three years they did the same task.   :33

Albert says this relatively modest training reduced the likelihood of being diagnosed with dementia 20 years later by about 25%. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.