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Even a modest amount of mental exercise appears to reduce the risk of dementia for decades. NPR's John Hamilton reports on a new study of people who did a specific type of cognitive training more than 20 years ago.
JOHN HAMILTON, BYLINE: The study involved cognitive speed training, which pushes the brain to process information more quickly. And the result is good news for people like George Kovach, who started doing this sort of exercise a decade ago.
GEORGE KOVACH: I was interested in taking care of my neurons.
HAMILTON: So Kovach signed up for an online program called BrainHQ, which includes the same cognitive speed training used in the study.
KOVACH: I think I've done over 1,300 days of BrainHQ exercises.
HAMILTON: Kovach says they're more challenging than a typical video game.
KOVACH: These things are hard, but you do get better at it. It makes your brain work. I look at it like doing sit-ups.
HAMILTON: Which Kovach also does. And he says, at 74, his brain is working better than ever. A study of more than 2,800 older adults suggests Kovach is on the right track. It found that people who got 10 hours of cognitive speed training plus some booster sessions were about 25% less likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's or another form of dementia. Marilyn Albert, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University, says, remarkably, the protection lasted for 20 years.
MARILYN ALBERT: We now have a gold-standard study that tells us there's something that we can significantly do to reduce our risk for dementia.
HAMILTON: The study appears in the journal, Alzheimer's & Dementia: Translational Research And Clinical Interventions. It used Medicare records to see what happened to people from a federally funded experiment that began in 1998. Albert says she didn't expect to see a benefit two decades later.
ALBERT: The fact that it's lasted and had an impact over 20 years is astonishing.
HAMILTON: The study, called ACTIVE, included exercises for memory and reasoning as well as speed, but only speed training had a long-term impact. Henry Mahncke, a neuroscientist and the CEO of BrainHQ, says it appears to trigger something called implicit learning, which involves acquiring automatic skills like riding a bike.
HENRY MAHNCKE: You could learn to ride a bike in about 10 hours of training. And then, hey, if you don't practice riding that bike for the next 20 years, your brain actually still has been rewired through brain plasticity. You now have a bike-riding brain.
HAMILTON: BrainHQ's version of this has people watch a computer screen. At some point, Mahncke says, a car or truck appears in the center and then something else shows up toward the edge.
MAHNCKE: If you had all day to look at that, anyone could figure out what's in the center - is it a car or a truck? - whereas something in your peripheral vision. But it doesn't give you all day. It shows the image on the screen to you very quickly and then it goes away.
HAMILTON: As you get better, the exercise gets faster. Mahncke says getting long-term results with just a few sessions raises an obvious question.
MAHNCKE: What if people had kept doing the speed training, right? What if they did the booster sessions once per year?
HAMILTON: An ongoing study funded by the National Institutes of Health may help answer that question. It's called the PACT study, and it has enrolled more than 7,000 people 65 and older. Jennifer O'Brien of the University of South Florida says, instead of 10 hours of training, participants will complete 45.
JENNIFER O'BRIEN: They are all doing a baseline series of training and then training boosters after the first year and after the second year.
HAMILTON: But O'Brien says people don't have to become mental marathoners to protect their brains. She says you can start with just 10 hours of training spread over a month or so.
O'BRIEN: And then you can stop, and likely you're going to see some benefits that are lasting. If you can do that every year, those benefits could last longer, and you could see the impacts all the way towards preventing dementia.
HAMILTON: O'Brien says the first results from the PACT study are likely to arrive in 2028. John Hamilton, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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