Elderly people with untreated poor vision are significantly more likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia than their clear-sighted counterparts, according to a study published online February 18 by the American Journal of Epidemiology. What’s more, the study suggests that vision problems may be a contributing factor in the development of dementia, rather than a symptom of it.

When elderly people with poor vision went to an ophthalmologist even once, their risk of dementia was reduced by 64 percent, the study found. People who had undergone eye procedures to treat glaucoma and correct cataracts were also less likely to develop dementia.

“Visual problems can have serious consequences and are very common among the elderly, but many of them are not seeking treatment,” said University of Michigan researcher Mary Rogers, the study’s lead author, in a prepared statement.

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Scientists in Germany found that increased physical activity was associated with a lower incidence of dementia. In this study, researchers recruited 3,485 elderly residents in Bavaria and asked them about their physical activity. None of the participants had dementia at the start of the analysis, but after two years of follow-up, researchers found that those who exercised at least three times a week were half as likely to have developed dementia compared with people who reported no physical activity. Based on his results, says lead author Dr. Thorleif Etgen, a professor of psychiatry and psychotherapy at München University, “It doesn’t make a big difference if you have moderate or high physical activity. The important message is that you do any activity. And even if you start late in life, at 60 or 70, there is a benefit, for it’s never too late to start exercising.”

The key words are “moderate or high,” according to another study published Monday in the Archives. Dr. Qi Sun, a researcher at Harvard School of Public Health, analyzed 13,000 women participating in the Nurses’ Health Study and found that when it came to exercise, more was better. Compared with women who jogged for 20 minutes a week, those who jogged three hours a week or walked briskly for five hours a week were 76% more likely to age successfully, free of chronic illnesses such as cancer and heart disease, as well as mental and physical impairment.

Sun’s group found that this benefit occurred across all weight divisions, meaning that even among those who were overweight or obese, women who exercised improved their odds of aging without chronic disease. The effects may apply across different age groups as well; the women were at least 60 years old by the time they enrolled in the study, and while Sun was not able to determine how long they had been exercising prior to that, the results suggest that the health benefits are not limited to the young.

That was the same message of the final exercise paper in the journal, by researchers at University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. In this trial, a group of 246 elderly women were randomly assigned to an 18-month exercise regimen or a wellness program. The women participating in the four times weekly exercise sessions, which involved aerobics and balance and muscle training, improved their bone mineral density by nearly 2%. The women in the wellness group, which focused on walking, muscle relaxation and breathing skills, had a 0.33% increase in bone density over the same time period. Perhaps more important, participants in the exercise group saw no increase in their risk of experiencing a fracture-causing fall, compared with a 66% higher risk in the control group.

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A large, 5-year study showed that the people in their 70s who were the most active and adhered the best to a Mediterranean-style diet were 61–67 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease compared with the least active and least Mediterranean-minded of the group.

Exercise
The most active in the study group got about an hour and a half of exercise weekly. That’s just a few 30-minute walks a week — a pretty manageable commitment. Better yet, aim to walk 30 minutes every day.

Diet
People with the lowest dementia risk ate the highest amounts of fruit, veggies, legumes, and fish, but less meat and dairy products. Monounsaturated fats, like olive oil, also accounted for more of their fat intake than saturated fats. All very typical ratios in a Mediterranean-style diet that doctors and health experts alike recommend for all sorts of reasons. These nutrient-dense, healthy-fat-focused foods could help protect brains against disease and cognitive decline and help protect the body from lots of other bad things, too.

By Laura Sanders, Science News

CHICAGO — A toned, buff bod isn’t the only thing a workout is good for. Exercise protects special brain cells in monkeys’ brains and improves motor function, a new study finds. The data, presented at a news briefing October 18 in Chicago at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, adds to a growing body of evidence that shows exercise is good for the brain, too.

“This is sort of a quiet revolution that’s been occurring in neuroscience,” says Carl Cotman, a brain aging expert at the University of California, Irvine, “to realize that physical activity at a certain level impacts the brain in a really profound way.”

In the new study, researchers led by Judy Cameron of the University of Pittsburgh trained six adult female rhesus monkeys to run on treadmills built for humans. Over a period of three months, monkeys either ran, jogged or sat on a treadmill for five hours each week. Monkeys that ran got their heart rates to about 80 percent of maximum, comparable to a human training program that would increase cardiovascular fitness. The jogging monkeys’ heart rates reached about 60 percent of maximum.

After this training period, the researchers hit the right side of the monkeys’ brains with a neurotoxin called MPTP, designed to selectively kill neurons that produce the signaling chemical dopamine. These neurons, and the dopamine they produce, regulate movement, and are the very same ones that die in people with Parkinson’s disease.

Sedentary monkeys showed the expected decrease in these dopamine neurons on the right side of the brain after the neurotoxin was applied. But in the brains of monkeys that had run for the past three months, the neurotoxin had almost no effect. In the runners, dopamine neurons were just as plentiful on the right side of the brain as on the left.

Jogging also had a protective effect, although slightly weaker than running’s, Cameron says. “This is really good news. It means that any little bit more activity you can do is positive for your brain,” says Cameron. “Your brain seems very sensitive to exercise.”

When the researchers continued the experiment for another six weeks, the results held. A brain scan revealed that “the animals that were exercising had virtually no loss of dopamine in those neurons,” Cameron says. “We think that exercise is very neuroprotective.”

Next, the researchers assessed the monkeys’ ability to use the hand affected by the neurotoxin. Monkeys had to retrieve a Lifesaver candy from a thin wire, an experiment designed to test motor coordination. Sedentary monkeys could not use their left, affected hand at all, while the runners showed no difference between their left and right hands, the researchers found.

The new study highlights the importance of exercise for maintaining a healthy brain. Other studies presented at the meeting have found that exercise has a wide range of brain-protective roles in mice, monkeys and humans.

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Your brain excels when you give it good nourishment, physical exercise, keep the stress down, get the right amount of sleep, and push it novel directions like using Myfitbrain.

Various studies involving brain scans found that every thought that passes through your mind affects your brain just like an action would. For example, when you practice a certain skill over a period of time, your brain will learn and thus you will master the skill. But a scientific study showed that mental practice alone can yield the same result. This sort of visualizations, thus stimulates the brain. Stimulation encourages neurogenesis. Scientists have always observed how people who think positively tend to live a healthier life – now they know why.

You don’t use, you lose. This is the first principle that governs the way your brain works. I mentioned previously how practice makes perfect. This is because as you practice, your brain grow new brain cells, called neurons, and creates synapses between those neurons.  Synapses allow the brain to work more efficiently by creating cause-and-effect relationships between neurons. Neurons that fire together, wire together through these synapses so that they’ll always fire together.

But these synapses break down if the neurons no longer fire together. Thus if you spend most of your time sitting down, or if you live an extremely sedentary life, it is inevitable for you to lose your ability to balance yourself on your legs as the synapses in you motor cortex breaks down.  This can be seen in people who were in a serious accident and had their legs in a cast for months on end. Though physiologically we should not have any problem walking, they often couldn’t because they need to relearn it.  Thus frequent exercise, something as simple as a slow walk, could prevent you from losing your independence later in old age. The same applies to your memory and your learning ability. If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.

Neurogenesis require energy to be carried out. Most of the energy that you possess, you acquire from your diet. Thus by consuming a healthy diet is crucial to a health brain. Stimulation alone will not be sufficient if your brain do not have the building block for neurogenesis.

Generally speaking, any food beneficial for your body will be beneficial for your brain. The first change you should make to your diet is to consume more leafy green vegetables. This is because they contain large amount of anti-oxidants, which combat the process of oxidation. As you might have known, oxidation kills cells – including brain cells.

But there’s one particular vitamin that I want to single out here in this article. Vitamin B12, is crucial for normal cognitive function but unfortunately, it cannot be found in any plant source. Beef and eggs are excellent sources of B12 but if you’re a vegan, be sure to supplement your diet with this vitamin.  Extreme cases of B12 deficiency can cause psychosis and mania.

You can get most brain stimulation from your daily life. But if you want to reverse a particular condition – say memory loss or even Alzheimer’s – or if you want to improve a particular function of your brain, I would recommend that you perform specially designed brain exercises.   There are various brain exercises, ranging from those that stimulate auditory processing to those that stimulates visual processing. Because these exercises are specially designed, they are generally more effective at correcting a specific problem than general techniques that you can do yourself.

Brain exercises that targets the auditory processing, for example, increases your ability to make out sounds and thus allows you to remember verbal stimulus better (things that you hear). Those that targets visual processing, on the other hand, allows you react faster and remember visual stimulus better (such as the written word and facial recognition).

Thus it is a mistake to assume that brain exercises benefits only the older generation. Fact is, everyone could use a little brain exercises to improve mental functions.

A new study from the University of California in Los Angeles suggests that piling on the pounds can shrink brains of older people, making them more vulnerable to cognitive problems.

According to Paul Thompson, brains of elderly people looked 16 years older than the brains of leaner peers.

The research involving 94 people in their 70s showed that people with higher body mass indexes had smaller brains on average, with the frontal and temporal lobes – important for planning and memory, respectively – particularly affected.

While no one knows whether these people are more likely to develop dementia, a smaller brain is indicative of destructive processes that can develop into dementia.

The team also found that the brains of the 51 overweight people were 6 per cent smaller than those of their normal-weight counterparts, on average, and those of the 14 obese people were 8 per cent smaller.

“The brains of overweight people looked eight years older than the brains of those who were lean, and 16 years older in obese people,” New Scientist quoted Thompson as saying.

Thompson suggests that as increased body fat ups the chances of having clogged arteries, which can reduce blood and oxygen flow to brain cells, the resulting reduction in metabolism could cause brain cell death and the shrinking seen.

He said that exercise protects the very brain regions that had shrunk.

“The most strenuous kind of exercise can save about the same amount of brain tissue that is lost in the obese,” he said.

The findings appear in journal Human Brain Mapping.

Two studies published in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association add to evidence that long-term lifestyle habits may reduce the risk of mental decline in old age.

The first study, a long-term look at 1,880 elderly people in New York City, found that a Mediterranean-type diet and physical activity each were linked to less risk for Alzheimer’s disease. The Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain at Columbia University Medical Center released the data as part of a larger research project on aging.

The second study, a shorter-term observation of 1,410 patients in France, found some correlation between a Mediterranean-type diet and slower cognitive damage.

Nikolaos Scarmeas, the author of the first study, grew up eating fish and vegetables in Athens, Greece. Now the neurologist suggests more people take up his mother’s cooking. Marked by high consumption of foods such as vegetables, legumes and cereals, served with olive oil, in addition to moderate fish and alcohol intake, the traditional diet has long conferred better cardiovascular health.

Starting in 1992, researchers at Columbia University monitored elderly patients every 18 months for diet, exercise and mental health, in addition to a number of controls including age, sex and education. “This is one of the first studies to tease apart the independent contributions of diet and exercise for dementia prevention,” says Ronald Petersen, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who was not involved in the research. “It suggests that aging need not be a passive process.”

These studies are observational and not definitive, but they hint at what might reduce the chances of Alzheimer’s or dementia. In the Columbia research, those who adhered most closely to the diet reduced their risk for Alzheimer’s by 40%, while those with the highest physical activity decreased their risk 33%, compared with people who didn’t adhere closely to the diet or were not physically active.

The French study found that subjects who adhered to the Mediterranean-type diet experienced a slower rate of mental decline than those who did not eat the diet, but did not prove a link for dementia, which requires a clinical assessment of a variety of mental and social functions.

Doctors in the field are careful to note that none of these findings demonstrate a causal relationship, but instead reflect the advantages of a continual healthy lifestyle. “The benefits don’t just occur at age 70 when you suddenly stop eating McDonald’s and start eating Brussels sprouts,” says David Knopman, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who wrote the editorial accompanying the studies in JAMA and wasn’t involved in either study. His editorial highlights confounding variables in the studies. “Healthy diet and exercise is part of a package of lifelong healthy living.”

Zaven Khachaturian, a senior science adviser to the Alzheimer’s Association, agrees. “This offers interesting insight but we need to turn it now into clinical trials,” says the former director of the Office of Alzheimer’s Disease Research at the National Institutes of Health.

These findings arrive a few weeks after new research identified a gene that could help predict who will develop Alzheimer’s—the leading cause of dementia—and at what age. The report, given in mid-July at the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease, concentrated on DNA surrounding the ApoE gene. Researchers say more studies are needed before the findings can be confirmed.

For now, Dr. Scarmeas says his studies strongly suggest that a Mediterranean diet and exercise both confer independent and positive health benefits. But together, they are even better.

“The relative risk reduction for Alzheimer’s is about 60% when you combine the diet and exercise,” he says.

Original Article by carrie.porter@wsj.com