- Brain speed training reduced dementia risk by approximately 25% with lasting benefits.
- Cognitive training focused on speed provided an advantage over memory and reasoning tasks.
- Early benefits include improvements to both attention and driving safety.
A new study finds that a certain kind of brain training seems to reduce the risk of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, by about 25%. And the benefits are real even years later.
Just over 2,800 participants were part of the late 1990s “ACTIVE” study, which was designed to see what could impact the risk of developing serious cognitive decline. A number of interventions were tried, but it is specifically a particular type of brain speed training that has yielded the recent hopeful findings, published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research and Clinical Interventions.
The Alzheimer’s Association reports that 7 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s and the number is expected to nearly double within the next quarter-century.
According to a news release on the research, “Researchers say it is one of the first results from a large randomized, controlled trial to demonstrate that any intervention — whether it is cognitive training, brain games, physical exercise, diet or drugs — can lower the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias."
The researchers noted that “no prior cognitive training intervention has been shown to reduce risk of (Alzheimer’s and related dementias) over a 20-year period.” They reported that “cognitive training involving speeded, dual attention, adaptive tasks has the potential to delay the diagnosis” of the cognitive disorders.
The evidence that cognitive training can improve brain function in healthy older adults has been growing, but that doesn’t necessarily apply to older adults who are not healthy. The study noted “ongoing debate regarding the efficacy of cognitive interventions to slow cognitive decline and reduce risk for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.”
The researchers, who came from several academic and medical centers, used Medicare claims data collected over a 20-year follow-up period to assess the effect of the interventions, including the brain speed training.
How the study worked
Between March 1998 and October 1999, the four-arm study was conducted in six metropolitan areas, the participants were people 65 and older who lived in their community, not in facilities. Those who already had significant cognitive or functional impairment were excluded. So were those already diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, recent stroke, certain cancers and ongoing cancer treatments, poor vision (the program relies on seeing) or challenges that would make it impossible to participate fully in the trial.
Participants were randomly assigned to one of four study arms and those who did the cognitive testing and assessment had no information about which one each person was in. The final analysis included 2,021 participants for whom full claims data was available.
The three intervention arms included up to 10 sessions in small groups, each lasting 60 to 75 minutes, over the course of six weeks: speed of processing training that was increasingly complex and presented in ever-shorter time bursts, memory training focused on using mnemonic strategies and reasoning training to solve serial patterns. The fourth group served as a control.
The program used for the brain speed training was Posit Science BrainHQ’s “Double Decision.” In it, two similar looking cars and various signs appear extremely briefly on a screen, then disappear. The person looking at it must indicate which vehicle appeared, as well as the sector of the scene the sign was in. Over time, other things are added, like cows in the field. It sounds simple, but becomes complex quite quickly.
When Deseret News first wrote about BrainHQ’s subscription-based games in 2022, BrainHQ was already among the most studied programs. For instance, the Defense Department had funded a clinical trial involving soldiers and veterans who had suffered blast injuries during military service. Cognitive function was four or five times improved by the program compared to playing regular video games.
Henry Mahncke, the CEO of Posit Science, told Deseret News then that focus, speed and concentration are needed. He said BrainHQ goals include speed, but also attention to details, social cognition and working memory.
“The brain has a lot of different parts and a lot of different specialization. And we wanted to improve speed and accuracy in all those parts,” he said.
“What we reliably see with these kinds of exercises is they do improve cognitive function, memory, attention, speed — and they improve real-world function as well,” said Mahncke. “They generalize to things like driving safely or reducing depressive symptoms or preserving independent activities of daily living.”
How booster training helps
In the just-released study, those who received at least eight of the 10 initial trainings were randomized again to receive booster training at 11 and 35 months in the form of four 75-minute training sessions.
Age at the time of training proved not to matter. Booster training didn’t matter for those in the memory or reasoning groups, but it did matter in the speed training group. It had a lower rate of Alzheimer’s and related dementias 20 years later.
Those in the speed training group who got booster training at 11 and 35 months after the first training had a statistically significant lower risk of being diagnosed with dementia 20 years later. That didn’t happen with those in the memory and reasoning training groups.
Per the study, “It is noteworthy that the speed training focused on improving both visual processing and attention, particularly divided attention. Moreover, the speed training differed from the memory and reasoning training in that it was administered on a computer in an adaptive manner, with increasing task difficulty based on the individual’s performance. It is possible that this led to broader brain activation.”
That same training also seemed to improve other tasks requiring divided attention, like driving. Those in the speed training group had lower at-fault collisions six years after the baseline training. And it was also associated with maintaining the ability to drive.