Con­cus­sion effect ‘spans decades’ (BBC)

- “Peo­ple con­cussed in their youth show sub­tle signs of men­tal and phys­i­cal prob­lems even more than 30 years later, say Cana­dian researchers.”

- “Dr Louis de Beau­mont, who led the study, said: “This study shows that the effects of sports con­cus­sions in early adult­hood per­sist beyond 30 years post-concussion, and that it can cause cog­ni­tive and motor func­tion alter­ations as the ath­letes age.”

- “Ath­letes should be bet­ter informed about the cumu­la­tive and per­sis­tent effects of sports con­cus­sion on men­tal and phys­i­cal processes so they know about the risk asso­ci­ated with return­ing to their sport.”

The study in question:

De Beau­mont L, The­o­ret H, Mon­geon D at al. Brain func­tion decline in healthy retired ath­letes who sus­tained their last sports con­cus­sion in early adult­hood. Brain 2009, Advanced online pub­li­ca­tion Jan­u­ary 27

Given the impor­tance of this topic, which we cov­ered in our 2008 Mar­ket Research, we are happy to read about new resources like a new book titled Sports Neu­ropsy­chol­ogy: Assess­ment and Man­age­ment of Trau­matic Brain Injury

From a recent book review by Gary S. Solomon, Ph.D.:

- “The past 15 years has yielded an explo­sion of infor­ma­tion on Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote this arti­cle for the March/ April edi­tion of the pub­li­ca­tion Aging Today, pub­lished by the Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging, and received per­mis­sion to repro­duce it here.

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In recent years, most pro­fes­sion­als in aging have become aware of the grow­ing sci­en­tific evi­dence show­ing that human brains retain the abil­ity to gen­er­ate neu­rons and change over a life­time, dis­cov­er­ies that have bro­ken the sci­en­tific par­a­digm preva­lent dur­ing the 20th cen­tury. Fur­ther­more, neu­roimag­ing and cog­ni­tive train­ing stud­ies are show­ing how well-directed exer­cise presents peo­ple major oppor­tu­ni­ties for healthy brain aging.

How can peo­ple use emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies to keep their brains healthy and pro­duc­tive as long as pos­si­ble? An emerg­ing mar­ket for brain health– $225 mil­lion mar­ket in 2007, in the United States alone, of which con­sumers account for $80 million–is try­ing to address that ques­tion in a way that com­ple­ments other impor­tant more tra­di­tional pil­lars (and multi-billion indus­tries) of brain health, such as phys­i­cal exer­cise, bal­anced diet, stress man­age­ment (stress has been shown to actu­ally kill neu­rons and reduce the rate of cre­ation of new ones) and over­all men­tal stim­u­la­tion and life­long learning.

2007 AN ACTIVE YEAR

A series of impor­tant events took place in 2007, a sem­i­nal year for the brain health field, begin­ning in Jan­u­ary when many main­stream media pub­li­ca­tions, such as Time Mag­a­zine and CBS News, started to pub­lish major sto­ries on neu­ro­plas­tic­ity and brain exer­cise. This media cov­er­age fol­lowed the pub­li­ca­tion of the long-awaited results from national clin­i­cal tri­als show­ing that sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­ages of the par­tic­i­pants age 65 and older who trained for five weeks improved their mem­ory, rea­son­ing and information-processing speed. Find­ings from the Advanced Cog­ni­tive Train­ing for Inde­pen­dent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) Study appeared in the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion (Dec. 20, 2006) and revealed that even after five years, par­tic­i­pants in the ACTIVE computer-based pro­gram showed less of a decline in information-processing skills than those in a con­trol group that received no cog­ni­tive training.

Read the rest of this entry »

This week we have enjoyed 3 great blog carnivals

• Encephalon (neu­ro­science and psychology)
• Grand Rounds (med­i­cine and health)
• Tan­gled Bank (gen­eral science)

And, of course, there are more on a vari­ety of topics:

Med­i­cine and web 2.0, Change of Shift, Edu­ca­tion, Read the rest of this entry »