Latest Research News

A study involving 65 older adults (average age 66), of whom 35 had type 2 diabetes, has found that after two years, those with diabetes had decreases in their ability to regulate blood flow in the brain, and a reduced ability to regulate blood flow was associated with lower cognitive scores.

Specifically, at the start of the study those with diabetes scored an average 46 points on a cognitive test, compared with 55 in the control group. After two years, the diabetics' scores had fallen to an average of 41, while the scores of the control group hadn't fallen at all.

A German study involving 1,936 older adults (50+) has found that mild cognitive impairment (MCI) occurred twice as often in those diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

A study involving 124 teenagers has found that those who were most accurate at tapping along with a metronome also showed the most consistent brain responses to a synthesized speech sound "da". The finding is consistent with previous research showing links between reading ability and beat-keeping ability, and between reading ability and the consistency of the brain's response to sound. The finding also provides more support for the benefits of music training for both language skills and auditory processing.

Cognitive decline is common in those with multiple sclerosis, but not everyone is so afflicted. What governs whether an individual will suffer cognitive impairment? One proposed factor is cognitive reserve, and a new study adds to the evidence that cognitive reserve does indeed help protect against cognitive decline, as it does with age-related decline.

A small study involving 18 individuals with at least one mild traumatic brain injury with related sleep disturbance has shown that six weeks of morning bright light therapy resulted in a marked decrease in subjective daytime sleepiness, and improved nighttime sleep.

Sleep, because of its role in brain plasticity, is likely to be important for brain recovery, but unfortunately sleep problems are common in those with TBI.

The research was presented on June 3, in Baltimore, Md., at SLEEP 2013, the 27th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC.

A very large genetic study has revealed that genetic differences have little effect on educational achievement. The study involved more than 125,000 people from the U.S., Australia, and 13 western European countries.

All told, genes explained about 2% of differences in educational attainment (as measured by years of schooling and college graduation), with the genetic variants with the strongest effects each explaining only 0.02% (in comparison, the gene variant with the largest effect on human height accounts for about 0.4%).

A large study, involving 3,690 older adults, has found that drugs with strong anticholinergic effects cause memory and cognitive impairment when taken continuously for a mere two months. Moreover, taking multiple drugs with weaker anticholinergic effects, such as many common over-the-counter digestive aids, affected cognition after 90 days’ continuous use. In both these cases, the risk of cognitive impairment doubled (approximately).

More than 10% of all babies are born preterm every year, and prematurity is a well-established risk factor for cognitive impairment at some level.

Prematurity affects working memory in particular

In a recent German study involving 1326 8-year-old children, it was found that being born preterm specifically affected the ability to solve tasks with a high cognitive load (i.e. greater demands on working memory), whereas tasks with a low load were largely unaffected.

A recent study reveals that when we focus on searching for something, regions across the brain are pulled into the search. The study sheds light on how attention works.

In the experiments, brain activity was recorded as participants searched for people or vehicles in movie clips. Computational models showed how each of the roughly 50,000 locations near the cortex responded to each of the 935 categories of objects and actions seen in the movie clips.

Late-life depression is associated with an increased risk for all-cause dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and, most predominantly, vascular dementia, a new study shows.

A new meta-analysis extends previous research showing a link between depression and Alzheimer’s disease to late-life depression and dementia. The analysis of 23 studies concluded that those with late-life depression were significantly more likely to develop dementia (1.85 times more likely), and that the risk of developing vascular dementia was significantly greater than that of developing Alzheimer’s (2.52 vs 1.65).