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Mental Exercise May Help Seniors

December 20, 2006

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Older adults who received cognitive training reported improved cognitive function for up to 5 years afterwards and less decline in the ability to perform daily activities as compared to those who did not receive the training, according to a study in the current issue of JAMA.

Decline in cognitive abilities has been shown to lead to an increased risk of difficulty in performing important activities of daily living (IADL). However, whether interventions to maintain or enhance cognitive abilities in older adults will prevent or delay these functional difficulties has been unclear.

Sherry L. Willis, Ph.D., of Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pa., and colleagues conducted the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) study between April 1998 and December 2004.

Participants in the study included 2,832 people (average age 73.6 years; 26 percent black), living independently in 6 U.S. cities, who were recruited from senior housing, community centers, and hospitals and clinics. Five-year follow-up was completed in 67 percent of the sample.

The study interventions included ten-session training for memory (verbal episodic memory), reasoning (inductive reasoning), or speed of processing (visual search and identification); and 4-session booster training at 11 and 35 months after training in a random sample of those who completed training.

At year 5, participants in all 3 intervention groups reported less difficulty compared with the control group in performing IADL. However, this effect was significant only for the reasoning group. Neither speed of processing training nor memory training had a significant effect on IADL.

The booster training for the speed of processing group, but not for the other 2 groups, showed a significant effect on the performance-based functional measure of everyday speed of processing.

No booster effects were seen for any of the groups for everyday problem-solving or self-reported difficulty in IADL. Each intervention maintained effects on its specific targeted cognitive ability through 5 years.

Booster training produced additional improvement with the reasoning intervention for reasoning performance and the speed of processing intervention for speed of processing performance.

"The ACTIVE study is the first large-scale, randomized trial to show that cognitive training improves cognitive function in well-functioning older adults and that this improvement lasts up to 5 years from the beginning of the intervention," the researchers wrote.

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