SENIORS ROCK MAGAZINE1

Well, my dad spends time every
day doing brain teasers called
Crypto-quips—puzzles that require
deciphering complex letter codes.
After he retired from work, he
took language classes, traveled
abroad, played bridge, performed
in an amateur theatre company,
and volunteered regularly in the
local senior center. Despite painful
arthritis, he still dances two times a
week with friends and takes regular
walks.
If researchers are right, my father
has (inadvertently) followed some
of the best practices for battling
mental decline. New studies are
pointing to ways one can slow, and
in some cases reverse, the memory
loss, distractibility, and other
cognitive deficits that often come
with advancing age. Here are three
of the key findings for how to keep
your brain fit.
1. EXERCISE!
You know how your doctor is
always telling you to get a moderate
amount of exercise to stay healthy?
Well now there’s evidence that
exercise not only helps your heart
and lungs, but it also might improve
your brain.
In a 2008 review of more than
50 scientific studies, researchers
Arthur Kramer and Kirk Erickson
found that regular aerobic exercise
improved brain functioning for
healthy people and those with
mild cognitive impairments. In
particular, those brain functions
associated with “executive
control”—such as multi-tasking,
planning, and problem solving—
were most affected by exercise.
Even moderate walking two-tothree
times a week over a six month
period was enough to produce
positive results. In one study,
brain imaging results revealed
that patients in the early stages
of Alzheimer’s disease who were
more aerobically fit had less brain
atrophy than those who were less
fit.
“Aerobic walking, riding a bike
or using a stationary bike, or
swimming—anything that sustains
your heart rate at 65 percent of
its maximum capacity or greater
senior’s rock magazine
for up 30 minutes—appears to
be neuroprotective”—meaning
it protects your brain—“and will
decrease your chances of getting
other diseases too,” says Kramer.
But how does it work? According
to Kramer, exercise enhances
neuroplasticity—the brain’s
ability to grow new neural and
blood flow pathways in response
to stimulation and learning. The
greater the brain’s reserve of neural
pathways, the better it can respond
to strokes, Alzheimer’s disease, or
head traumas from falls, which all
become more likely as you age.
Researchers need more information
before they will more fully
understand the relationship
between exercise and brain
function, says Kramer. For
example, it isn’t clear yet if there
is a ‘dose response,’ where more
exercise equates to better cognitive
health, or whether slacking off
on an exercise program changes
the equation. Still, Kramer is
convinced that exercise is central to
maintaining brain health.
2. BE SOCIAL
Researchers have long known that
having social connections helps
protect against the negative impacts
of aging. But not until recently have
they been able to show a direct link
between social activity levels and
the brain.
In a 2007 study, Valerie Crooks, a
researcher with Kaiser Permanente,
assessed 2,200 women over a
four-year period, looking for
signs of mental decline while
evaluating their degree of social
connection. Her study found that
women who had a larger social
network and daily social contact
had a substantially lower risk of
developing dementia, even when
she factored in age and hormone
use.
In a similar study, Robert Wilson
of Rush University’s Alzheimer’s
Disease Center in Chicago found
that people who felt lonely were
more likely to develop dementia.
Wilson and his group followed
a group of 80-year-old patients
with no signs of dementia and
assessed their loneliness, memory
loss, and confusion levels every
year for four years. For every one
point increase on their loneliness
measurement scale, the risk of
developing dementia increased 51
percent over that period. Even when
patients had many social contacts,
feeling lonely led to mental decline,
suggesting that the quality of social
interactions may be more important
than the quantity.
“Our results are consistent with
other studies which show that
negative emotions are related to
the development of dementia and
cognitive decline in old age,” says
Wilson.
Interestingly, when Wilson’s group
looked at the brain autopsies of
subjects who died during their
study, they found that some people
who hadn’t reported feeling lonely
still showed plaques or tangles in
their brains—the physiological
hallmarks of Alzheimer’s—without
actually developing the symptoms
of dementia, such as memory loss
and confusion. In other words,
having positive social connections
may have protected them from
Alzheimer’s dementia, even though
their brain’s physiology seemed
to leave them vulnerable to it.
Although researchers are still trying
to figure out this phenomenon,
Wilson thinks that having good
social connections over time may
somehow build up overall brain
functioning, so that one part of the
brain can take over if another part
becomes damaged.
Joining a group, taking a class, or
scheduling regular visits and phone
calls with friends and family can all
help build these social connections.
The same goes for doing volunteer
work, which may carry added
benefits: According to preliminary
results from a recent study by Sei
Lee at the University of California,
San Francisco, presented this past
May at the annual meeting of the
American Geriatrics Society, people
who volunteered lived longer, even
after considering other factors,
like socioeconomic status, chronic
health conditions, and cognititive
function.
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