A study involving 70 older adults (60-83) has found that those with at least ten years of musical training performed the best on cognitive tests, followed by those with one to nine years of musical study, with those with no musical training trailing the field.

All the musicians were amateurs who began playing an instrument at about 10 years of age. Half of the high-level musicians still played an instrument at the time of the study, but they didn't perform better on the cognitive tests than the other advanced musicians who had stopped playing years earlier. Previous research suggests that both years of musical participation and age of acquisition are critical.

All the participants had similar levels of education and fitness. The cognitive tests related to visuospatial memory, naming objects and executive function.

A study involved 117 older adults (mean age 78) found those at greater risk of coronary artery disease had substantially greater risk for decline in verbal fluency and the ability to ignore irrelevant information. Verbal memory was not affected.

The findings add to a growing body of research linking cardiovascular risk factors and age-related cognitive decline, leading to the mantra: What’s good for the heart is good for the brain.

The study also found that the common classification into high and low risk groups was less useful in predicting cognitive decline than treating risk as a continuous factor. This is consistent with a growing view that no cognitive decline is ‘normal’, but is always underpinned by some preventable damage.

Risk for coronary artery disease was measured with the Framingham Coronary Risk Score, which uses age, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, presence of diabetes, and smoking status to generate a person's risk of stroke within 10 years. 37 (31%) had high scores. Age, education, gender, and stroke history were controlled for in the analysis.

From the Whitehall II study, data involving 5431 older participants (45-69 at baseline) has revealed a significant effect of midlife sleep changes on later cognitive function. Sleep duration was assessed at one point between 1997 and 1999, and again between 2002 and 2004. A decrease in average night’s sleep from 6, 7, or 8 hours was significantly associated with poorer scores on tests of reasoning, vocabulary, and the MMSE. An increase from 7 or 8 hours (but not from 6 hours) was associated with lower scores on these, as well as on tests of phonemic and semantic fluency. Short-term verbal memory was not significantly affected. The magnitude of these effects was equivalent to a 4–7 year increase in age.

Around 8% of participants showed an increase from 7-8 hours of sleep over the five-year period (7.4% of women; 8.6% of men), while around a quarter of women and 18% of men decreased their sleep amount from 6-8 hours. About 58% of men and 50% of women reported no change in sleep duration during the study period. Some 27% of the participants were women.

The optimal amount of sleep (in terms of highest cognitive performance) was 7 hours for women, closely followed by 6 hours. For men, results were similar at 6, 7 and 8 hours.

Analysis took into account age, sex, education and occupational status. The Whitehall II study is a large, long-running study involving British civil servants. Sleep duration was assessed simply by responses to the question "How many hours of sleep do you have on an average week night?"

A very large Chinese study, involving 28,670 older adults (50-85), of whom some 72% were women, also supports an inverted U-shaped association between sleep duration and cognitive function, with 7-8 hours sleep associated with the highest scores on a delayed word recall test.

I would speculate that this finding of an effect of short-term verbal memory (in contrast to that of the Whitehall study) may reflect a group distinction in terms of education and occupation. The Whitehall study is the more homogenous (mostly white-collar), with participants probably averaging greater cognitive reserve than the community-based Chinese study. The findings suggest that memory is slower to be affected, rather than not affected.

A study involving 614 middle-aged vineyard workers has found that those who were exposed to pesticides were five times as likely to perform more poorly on cognitive tests compared to those not exposed, and twice as likely to show cognitive decline over a two-year period.

Participants were in their 40s and 50s and had worked for at least 20 years in the agricultural sector. One in five had never been exposed to pesticides as part of their job; over half had been directly exposed, and the remainder had been possibly or certainly indirectly exposed. Educational level, age, sex, alcohol consumption, smoking, psychotropic drug use and depressive symptoms were taken into account.

Comparison of young adults (mean age 24.5) and older adults (mean age 69.1) in a visual memory test involving multitasking has pinpointed the greater problems older adults have with multitasking. The study involved participants viewing a natural scene and maintaining it in mind for 14.4 seconds. In the middle of the maintenance period, an image of a face popped up and participants were asked to determine its sex and age. They were then asked to recall the original scene.

As expected, older people had more difficulty with this. Brain scans revealed that, for both groups, the interruption caused their brains to disengage from the network maintaining the memory and reallocate resources to processing the face. But the younger adults had no trouble disengaging from that task as soon as it was completed and re-establishing connection with the memory maintenance network, while the older adults failed both to disengage from the interruption and to reestablish the network associated with the disrupted memory.

This finding adds to the evidence that an important (perhaps the most important) reason for cognitive decline in older adults is a growing inability to inhibit processing, and extends the processes to which that applies.