A study involving 2,000 healthy older adults (average age 78) found that mentally stimulating activities were linked to a lower risk or delay of MCI, and that the timing and number of these activities may also play a role.
During the study, 532 participants developed MCI.
While it’s well-established that chronic stress has all sorts of harmful effects, including on memory and cognition, the judgment on brief bouts of acute stress has been more equivocal. There is a certain amount of evidence that brief amounts of stress can be stimulating rather than harmful, and perhaps even necessary if we are to reach our full potential.
A new study adds more support to the idea that the increasing difficulty in learning new information and skills that most of us experience as we age is not down to any difficulty in acquiring new information, but rests on the interference from all the old information.
My recent reports on brain training for older adults (see, e.g., Review of working memory training programs finds no broader benefit; Cognitive training shown to help healthy older adults; Video game training benefits cognition in some older adults) converge on the idea that cognitive training can indeed be beneficial for older adults’
We know that physical exercise greatly helps you prevent cognitive decline with aging. We know that mental stimulation also helps you prevent age-related cognitive decline. So it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a way of combining the two. A new study found that older adults improved executive function more by participating in virtual reality-enhanced exercise ("exergames") that combine physical exercise with computer-simulated environments and interactive videogame features, compared to the same exercise without the enhancements.
A long-running study involving 1,157 healthy older adults (65+) who were scored on a 5-point scale according to how often they participated in mental activities such as listening to the radio, watching television, reading, playing games and going to a museum, has found that this score is correlated to the rate of cognitive decline in later years.