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 »

Sharon Beg­ley, Newsweek’s sci­ence reporter, recently wrote that

- “With the nation’s 78 mil­lion baby boomers approach­ing the age of those dreaded ‘“where did I leave my keys?” moments, it’s no won­der the mar­ket for computer-based brain train­ing has shot up from essen­tially zero in 2005 to $80 mil­lion this year, accord­ing to the con­sult­ing firm SharpBrains.

- “Now comes the largest and most rig­or­ous study of a commercially-available train­ing pro­gram, and it shows that there is hope for aging brains. This morn­ing, at the meet­ing of the Geron­to­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­ica, sci­en­tists are pre­sent­ing data show­ing that after eight weeks of daily one-hour ses­sions with Brain Fit­ness 2.0 from Posit Sci­ence, elderly vol­un­teers got mea­sur­ably bet­ter in their brain’s speed and accu­racy of processing.

We recently had the chance to inter­view Dr. Eliz­a­beth Zelin­ski of the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia Andrus Geron­tol­ogy Cen­ter, who led the IMPACT (Improve­ment in Mem­ory with Plasticity-based Adap­tive Cog­ni­tive Train­ing) Study Sharon Beg­ley refers to in the quote above.

First, some con­text on this study, which is by far the largest high-quality study of its kind. The study was prospec­tive, ran­dom­ized, con­trolled, and used a dou­ble blind trial. 524 healthy adults 65-year-old and over were divided into two groups. One received an hour a day of train­ing for eight to ten weeks, and the other spent the same amount of time watch­ing edu­ca­tional DVDs. The IMPACT study, funded by Posit Sci­ence cor­po­ra­tion, was per­formed in mul­ti­ple loca­tions, includ­ing the Mayo Clinic, USCF, and San Fran­cisco Vet­eran Affairs Med­ical Center.

The dis­cus­sion cen­ters at his point on the ini­tial results that were pre­sented Geron­to­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Amer­ica (the study hasn’t been pub­lished yet).

Alvaro Fer­nan­dez: Dr. Zelin­ski. Thank you for being with us. Could you start by set­ting the con­text and pro­vid­ing an overview of how human cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties typ­i­cally evolve as we age based on insights from your Long Beach Lon­gi­tu­di­nal Study?

Eliz­a­beth Zelin­ski: Of course. The first con­cept to under­stand is that dif­fer­ent cog­ni­tive skills evolve over the lifes­pan in dif­fer­ent ways. Some that rely on expe­ri­ence, such as vocab­u­lary, actu­ally improve as we age. Some tend to decline grad­u­ally, start­ing in our late 20s. This hap­pens, for exam­ple, with pro­cess­ing speed (how long it takes us to process and respond to infor­ma­tion), mem­ory, and rea­son­ing. We could sum­ma­rize this phe­nom­e­non by say­ing that as we age we get bet­ter at deal­ing with the famil­iar, but worse at deal­ing with the new. We can always learn, but at a slower pace.

Are there any spe­cific tip­ping or inflec­tion points in this trend, any age when the rate of decline is more pronounced?

We don’t have a clear answer to that. It depends a lot on the indi­vid­ual. In gen­eral it is a grad­ual, cumu­la­tive process, so that by age 70 we sta­tis­ti­cally see clear age declines. Which, for exam­ple, is a strong fac­tor deter­min­ing why older adults strug­gle to adapt to new tech­nolo­gies, but why try­ing to learn them pro­vides needed men­tal stim­u­la­tion. Now we know that genes only account for a por­tion of this decline. Much of it depends on our envi­ron­ment, lifestyle and actions.

Can you sum­ma­rize what a healthy indi­vid­ual can do to slow down this process of decline, and help stay healthy and pro­duc­tive as long as possible?

One gen­eral rec­om­men­da­tion is to do every­thing we can to pre­vent or delay dis­ease processes, such as dia­betes or high-blood pres­sure, that have a neg­a­tive effect on our brains. For exam­ple, it is a tragedy in our soci­ety that we usu­ally reduce our lev­els of phys­i­cal exer­cise dras­ti­cally after we leave school.

Let me then ask: what are the rel­a­tive virtues of phys­i­cal vs. men­tal exercise?

Great ques­tion! That in fact leads into my sec­ond rec­om­men­da­tion. Aer­o­bic exer­cise has been shown to Read the rest of this entry »

Q: How can I improve my mem­ory? Is there a daily exer­cise I can do to improve it?

A: The most impor­tant com­po­nent of mem­ory is atten­tion. By choos­ing to attend to some­thing and focus on it, you cre­ate a per­sonal inter­ac­tion with it, which gives it per­sonal mean­ing, mak­ing it eas­ier to remem­ber.
Read the rest of this entry »