June 25, 2019 – Brain Training

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Anchor lead: Does brain training help stave off Alzheimer’s disease? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Education seems to produce a cognitive reserve, helping stave off clinical signs of Alzheimer’s disease even while the biological process continues, research by Rebecca Gottesman, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues has shown. Gottesman says the study suggests that brain training may help but there is no one size fits all.

Gottesman: I don’t think it’s one magical formula as to this is the brain training test you need to do, it really is going to vary from person to person to what’s some kind of cognitively taxing activity for them to do that they enjoy. If you don’t enjoy doing it and you never do it it doesn’t serve any purpose certainly. So doing something theoretically may be helpful. Our study doesn’t tell us that doing those things specifically is helpful but there’s evidence that it might be theoretically but we just don’t know what those individual recipes are for cognitive training for different people.  :28

Other preventive strategies identified by experts include regular exercise and keeping blood pressure within normal limits, she notes. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.