seniors

A study involving over 1100 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease at 50 French clinics has revealed that receiving a comprehensive care plan involving regular 6-monthly assessments (with standardised guidelines for the management of problems) produced no benefits compared to receiving the usual care (an annual consultation). After two years, there was no significant difference in functional decline between the two groups, and no difference in the risk of being admitted to an institution or death.

A small study suggests that the apathy shown by many Alzheimer's patients may not simply be due to memory or language problems, but to a decreased ability to experience emotions. The seven patients were asked to rate pictures of positive and negative scenes (such as babies and spiders) by putting a mark closer or further to either a happy face or a sad face emoticon. Closeness to the face indicated the strength of the emotion felt.

Confirming previous research, a study involving 270 Alzheimer’s patients has found that larger head size was associated with better performance on memory and thinking tests, even when there was an equivalent degree of brain damage. The findings are consistent with the theory of cognitive reserve. They also point to the importance of brain development early in life, since the brain reaches 93% of its final size at age six, and while partly determined by genes, brain growth is also influenced by nutrition, infections, and brain injuries.

Anticholinergics are widely used for a variety of common medical conditions including insomnia, allergies, or incontinence, and many are sold over the counter. Now a large six-year study of older African-Americans has found that taking one anticholinergic significantly increased an individual's risk of developing mild cognitive impairment and taking two of these drugs doubled this risk. The risk was greater for those who didn’t have the ‘Alzheimer’s gene’, APOE-e4.

While brain training programs can certainly improve your ability to do the task you’re practicing, there has been little evidence that this transfers to other tasks. In particular, the holy grail has been very broad transfer, through improvement in working memory. While there has been some evidence of this in pilot programs for children with ADHD, a new study is the first to show such improvement in older adults using a commercial brain training program.

A review of the many recent studies into the effects of music training on the nervous system strongly suggests that the neural connections made during musical training also prime the brain for other aspects of human communication, including learning. It’s suggested that actively engaging with musical sounds not only helps the plasticity of the brain, but also helps provide a stable scaffolding of meaningful patterns. Playing an instrument primes the brain to choose what is relevant in a complex situation.

A rat study demonstrates how specialized brain training can reverse many aspects of normal age-related cognitive decline in targeted areas. The month-long study involved daily hour-long sessions of intense auditory training targeted at the primary auditory cortex. The rats were rewarded for picking out the oddball note in a rapid sequence of six notes (five of them of the same pitch). The difference between the oddball note and the others became progressively smaller. After the training, aged rats showed substantial reversal of their previously degraded ability to process sound.

Another study has come out showing that older adults with low levels of vitamin D are more likely to have cognitive problems. The six-year study followed 858 adults who were age 65 or older at the beginning of the study. Those who were severely deficient in vitamin D were 60% more likely to have substantial cognitive decline, and 31% more likely to have specific declines in executive function, although there was no association with attention.

It’s been suggested before that Down syndrome and Alzheimer's are connected. Similarly, there has been evidence for connections between diabetes and Alzheimer’s, and cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s. Now new evidence shows that all of these share a common disease mechanism. According to animal and cell-culture studies, it seems all Alzheimer's disease patients harbor some cells with three copies of chromosome 21, known as trisomy 21, instead of the usual two. Trisomy 21 is characteristic of all the cells in people with Down syndrome.

Part of the Women's Health Initiative study looking at the effect of hormone therapy on thinking and memory in postmenopausal women, involving over 1400 women, has found those who had high blood pressure at the start of the study (eight years earlier) had significantly higher amounts of white matter lesions. Damage to white matter seems to be an independent risk factor for dementia. The finding adds to evidence suggesting that preventing hypertension helps protect against dementia. High blood pressure is common in the U.S.