Good arti­cle today in the NYT on “chemo brain” — some typ­i­cal short-term and long-term cog­ni­tive con­se­quences of chemotherapy.

The Fog That Fol­lows Chemother­apy (New York Times)

One quote is crit­i­cal — for chemo brain and also for a vari­ety of clin­i­cal con­di­tions that present asso­ci­ated cog­ni­tive impairments:

“Con­trol­ling for brain func­tion before can­cer treat­ment begins can help deter­mine cause and effect. In one study, can­cer patients took a bat­tery of neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal tests before start­ing chemother­apy, three weeks after com­plet­ing treat­ment, and again one year later. Although a third of the patients had signs of cog­ni­tive impair­ment before ther­apy began, the num­ber jumped to 61 per­cent after treat­ment, and half remained impaired a year later.”

As we have dis­cussed before, I believe that inex­pen­sive com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive assess­ments will start to become widely avail­able in only a few years, to help set up indi­vid­u­al­ized cog­ni­tive base­lines and inform clin­i­cal diag­noses and treat­ments. For more, you can read Com­put­er­ized Cog­ni­tive Assess­ments: oppor­tu­ni­ties and concerns

Let me sum­ma­rize ten high­lights and reflec­tions from stim­u­lat­ing dis­cus­sions on cog­ni­tive health and assess­ments I have had this month so far.

Jan­u­ary 8-9th: Sym­po­sium on Co-Adaptive Learn­ing: Adap­tive Tech­nol­ogy for the Aging (details Here), orga­nized by the Ari­zona State University’s Cen­ter for Adap­tive Neural Systems:

1. Cog­ni­tive health is a crit­i­cal fac­tor in over­all health­care, but is often approached in a frag­mented, non-systematic way. Most speak­ers in the sym­po­sium did men­tion how cog­ni­tive health issues inter­act with their spe­cific areas of focus (aging, Parkinson’s Dis­ease, trau­matic brain injury, Alzheimer’s…) but there was a lack of a com­mon frame­work and tax­on­omy to define the prob­lem and iden­tify solu­tions and inter­ven­tions to mea­sure and help main­tain cog­ni­tive health across the lifespan.

2. For exam­ple, Parkinson’s Dis­ease. Did you know (I didn’t) that a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of Parkinson’s patients have well-identified cog­ni­tive impair­ments, mostly in their exec­u­tive func­tions but also per­cep­tual problems?

3. We truly need a Cul­ture of Cog­ni­tive Health, as Ran­dal Koene pointed out.

4. May online cog­ni­tive games serve as ongo­ing, real-time assess­ment of cog­ni­tive func­tion? Misha Pavel thought so. He also added we may well see “cog­ni­tive exer­cise coaches” some­time in the horizon.

5. Skip Rizzo pre­sented how vir­tual real­ity can help address Post Trau­matic Stress Dis­or­der (PTSD) and even to admin­is­ter inno­v­a­tive cog­ni­tive assessments.

6. My pre­sen­ta­tion, titled The Emerg­ing Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness Mar­ket: Sta­tus, Trends and Chal­lenges, is avail­able Here

7. Jan­u­ary 22nd: Con­sumer Reports orga­nized a health sum­mit titled Read the rest of this entry »

The arti­cle Clumsy kids more likely to become obese adults: study (CBC)…

- “The study was based on tests of about 11,000 peo­ple in Britain who were tested for hand con­trol, co-ordination and clum­si­ness at age seven and 11, and were then fol­lowed until age 33.”

- “Prof. Scott Mont­gomery of the Karolin­ska Insti­tutet in Stock­holm and his col­leagues at Impe­r­ial Col­lege Lon­don in Eng­land said they pur­posely chose mea­sure­ments of fine hand con­trol such as pick­ing up matches, rather than those likely to be influ­enced by par­tic­i­pat­ing in sports, such as catch­ing balls.”

- “While it is often assumed that the cog­ni­tive impair­ments seen in adult obe­sity are a con­se­quence of excess weight, that could be putting the chicken before the egg, the researchers say”

…reminds me of Judith Beck’s words on how to “Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person”

- “The main mes­sage of cog­ni­tive ther­apy over­all, and its appli­ca­tion in the diet world, is straight-forward: prob­lems los­ing weight are not one’s fault. Prob­lems sim­ply reflect lack of skills–skills that can be acquired and mas­tered through prac­tice. Read the rest of this entry »