Healthcare (Commonwealth Union) – Elderly individuals particularly those who are 65 years and older who completed five to six weeks of cognitive speed training — specifically speed-of-processing exercises that teach people to rapidly spot visual information on a computer screen and manage increasingly complex tasks in less time — and who attended refresher sessions one to three years later were less likely to develop dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, even up to 20 years afterward. Exercise in particular is known have a great deal of positive effects on individuals with dementia as seen in prior studies. Keeping the brain active and higher studies have also shown beneficial results over the years.
These results come from new research published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research and Clinical Interventions.
Funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the project is the first randomized clinical trial to examine a 20-year connection between cognitive training and dementia risk. It draws on participants from the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) study. Researchers enrolled 2,802 adults in 1998–99 to evaluate long-term outcomes of three forms of cognitive training — memory, reasoning, and speed-of-processing — compared with a control group that received no training. Participants in the training arms completed as many as 10 sessions lasting 60–75 minutes over five to six weeks. In addition, half of them were randomly assigned to receive up to four booster sessions held 11 and 35 months after the initial training.
Over the 20-year follow-up period, 105 of 264 participants (40%) in the speed-training group that received boosters developed dementia. That rate was about 25% lower than the control group, where 239 of 491 participants (49%) were diagnosed. This was the only training approach that showed a statistically significant difference from the control group.
To conduct the analysis, researchers examined Medicare records from 2,021 participants — 72% of the original cohort — spanning 1999 to 2019. The follow-up group closely resembled the initial sample: roughly three-quarters were women, 70% were white, and the average starting age was 74. During the two decades of tracking, about three-quarters of participants died, at an average age of 84.
Dementia refers to a decline in cognitive abilities severe enough to prevent a person from functioning independently in everyday life. The condition remains a global concern with increasing numbers of aging populations. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form, making up roughly 60%–80% of cases, while vascular dementia represents about 5%–10%. Other forms include Lewy body dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and mixed types.
Marilyn Albert, Ph.D., senior author of the study and director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Johns Hopkins Medicine indicated that seeking that speed-of-processing training was associated with a reduced risk of dementia 20 years later is striking, because it indicates that a relatively simple, non-drug intervention can produce long-lasting benefits.
She further indicated that even modest delays in the onset of dementia could significantly benefit public health and help curb escalating health care expenses.
Albert added that more research is necessary to clarify the biological or cognitive mechanisms behind these links and to determine why reasoning and memory training did not show similar long-term effects over the 20-year period.
“Our findings provide support for the development and refinement of cognitive training interventions for older adults, particularly those that target visual processing and divided attention abilities,” explained the principal investigator of the site George Rebok, Ph.D., who is a lifespan developmental psychologist who forms community programs for healthy aging and is a professor emeritus of mental health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It is possible that adding this cognitive training to lifestyle change interventions may delay dementia onset, but that remains to be studied.”
