Cell phone exposure may be helpful in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease, a new study shows.

The study, involving mice, provides evidence that long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves associated with cell phone use may protect against, and even reverse, Alzheimer’s disease.

The study is published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

“It surprised us to find that cell phone exposure, begun in early adulthood, protects the memory of mice otherwise destined to develop Alzheimer’s symptoms,” study researcher Gary Arendash, PhD, of the University of South Florida, says in a news release. “It was even more astonishing that the electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones actually reversed memory impairment in old Alzheimer’s mice.”

The researchers say they found that exposing old mice with Alzheimer’s disease to electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones reduced brain deposits of beta-amyloid. Brain plaques formed by the abnormal accumulation of beta-amyloid are hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease, which is why most treatments try to target the protein.

The study involved 96 mice, including mice genetically engineered to develop Alzheimer’s disease and normal mice. Both the Alzheimer’s mice and the normal rodents were exposed to the electromagnetic field generated by standard cell use for two one-hour periods daily for seven to nine months.

The researchers say that if cell phone exposure was begun when the Alzheimer’s mice were young adults, and before signs of memory loss became apparent, their cognitive ability was protected. And if older mice with Alzheimer’s were exposed, their memory impairment improved. What’s more, months of cell phone exposure even boosted the memories of normal mice, the researchers write.

The researchers say the memory benefits in normal mice of cell phone exposure took months to show up, suggesting a similar effect in humans might take years. However, they also caution that “care should be taken in extrapolating our results to cell phone use and [electromagnetic wave] exposure in humans.”

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Multitasking is pervasive in our society, but that does not mean it is a good thing. When you multitask, you may think you are getting a lot done, but there’s a cost when the tasks compete for the same (and limited) cognitive resources (e.g., attention, working memory) and draw on the same brain circuitry. This is true, no matter how good you think you are at multitasking. There’s just too much competition for the same neural circuits and what you end up with is a compromise. Neither task is performed as well as it is when performed alone.

What are the effects of multitasking in the workplace? Multitasking may actually be counterproductive. It seems that e-mail, instant messaging, cell phones, and personal digital assistants (PDAs), which keep us all connected and allow many of us to do our jobs, can also diminish productivity.

A study by Basex, Inc., a knowledge-management research firm in New York, reported that knowledge workers (people whose work output is mainly informational in nature, e.g., creating documents, reports, studies, inventions, or patents) waste an average of two hours a day due to interruptions from e-mails, co-workers, and cell phones. Recovery time from each interruption can vary but it comes with a stiff price tag for the American economy: $650 billion every year.

How good are you at multitasking?   Try this:

Part I:
Take a blank sheet of paper and write on the top:

Multitasking is inefficient.

With a stopwatch or a watch with a second hand, start timing how long it takes you to recopy the phrase
Multitasking is inefficient.

There is a catch:
Every time you write down a letter in the phrase, on a line below the phrase, write down a corresponding number (beginning with 1).
See how long it takes you to write the phrase Multitasking is inefficient and the list of numbers from 1 to 25.

Write down your time for completion at the bottom of the page.

Part II:
Take another blank sheet of paper.  With a stopwatch or a watch with a second hand, start timing how long it takes to write the phrase

Multitasking is inefficient.

When you are finished writing the phrase, immediately write down the numbers 1 through 25 on a separate line.

Write down your time for completion at the bottom of the page.

Compare your two times. Don’t be surprised to find that it takes you twice as long to complete Part I (when you forced yourself to multitask) than Part II.

Myfitbrain brain games

If Alzheimer’s disease runs in your family, you’ve probably given some thought to whether you can escape. A new study provides some insight, scoring 3,375 older people on a list of factors that researchers found predicted the risk of developing dementia. Deborah Barnes, lead author and assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California-San Francisco, says that she hopes the system can one day be boiled down into a shorter checklist that can be completed in five to 10 minutes in a doctor’s office. By filtering out some of the more expensive predictors—those involving brain MRIs, for instance—Barnes says she hopes to see an easy, inexpensive index developed one day.

The people studied earned 1 or 2 points for each measure that applies to them, resulting in a score of zero to 15. In the study, 56 percent of people who earned a high score on the index—defined as 8 or more points—developed dementia within six years. Twenty-three percent of those who had moderate scores—4 to 7 points—developed dementia within that time. And 4 percent of those who had low scores—3 or fewer points—ended up with dementia within six years. Since the risk factors are predictive of dementia but are not necessarily causal, Barnes notes, “changing these things would not necessarily mean that you would lower your risk of dementia.”

In case you want to take precautions, here’s a look at the items that make up the index and some steps you can take now to improve your score later in life:
To view the “items that make up the index and some steps you can take to improve your score late in life,” visit the following link: A New Way to Predict Alzheimer’s?