Keeping the mind active staves off dementia at first but speeds it up later
Dr Robert Wilson, of Rush University Medical Centre in Chicago, stated the benefits of an active mind may come at a cost later in life – even though he did not know why.
“We think that mental activity tends to stave of the initial symptoms of cognitive impairment and therefore to delay dementia onset,” he said.
“However, if dementia does eventually develop, it progresses more rapidly in those who had previously maintained a mentally active lifestyle.”
Dr Wilson stated mentally stimulating activities may somehow enhance the brain’s capability to function relatively normally despite the build-up of lesions in the brain associated with dementia.
However, once they are diagnosed with dementia, people who have a more mentally active lifestyle are likely to have more brain changes related to dementia compared to those without a lot of mental activity.
Dr Wilson said, as a result, those with more mentally active lifestyles may experience a faster rate of decline once dementia begins.
He noted that mental activities compress the time period that a person spends with dementia, delaying its begin and then speeding up its progress.
Dr Wilson added: “This reduces the overall amount of time that a person may suffer from dementia.”
For the study, researchers evaluated the mental activities of 1,157 people age 65 or older who did not have dementia at the begin of the almost 12-year study.
People answered questions about how often they participated in mental activities such as listening to the radio, watching telly, reading, playing games and going to a museum; for this five-point cognitive activity scale, the more points scored, the more often people participated in mentally stimulating exercises.
During the next six years, the study found that the rate of cognitive decline in people without cognitive impairment was reduced by 52 per cent for each point on the brain activity scale.
For people with Alzheimer’s disease, the average rate of decline per year increased by 42 per cent for each point on the brain activity scale.
The research was published in the journal Neurology.
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Submited at Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at 3:00 am on Health by ethan
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