What does 20 years of follow up tell us about activities to protect the brain? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Cognitive speed training, where a computer is used to present an image and require tasks based on images that speeds up, resulted in fewer dementia diagnoses than other types of cognitive training, a study of more than 2800 adults over twenty years of follow up has shown. Marilyn Albert, study author and an Alzheimer’s expert at Johns Hopkins, says things diverged from the 10 year mark.

Albert: Now this is 20 years later and the outcome they're looking at is Medicare claims that dementia diagnosis by a physician recorded in Medicare, and what the study has found is that people who did the speed training in particular had a 25% lower risk of dementia based on Medicare claims data. These findings are really significant because it's done in the context of what we call a randomized control trial.    :28

Such a trial places participants in different groups for the interventions and then compares the outcomes. Participants are matched for many other factors so differences can be attributed to the intervention. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.