A new study shows that drinking a daily dose of wild blueberry juice improved the memory of older adults with age-related memory problems. It’s the first study to show this potential benefit of blueberries in those at risk for dementia.
“The findings of this preliminary study suggest that moderate term blueberry supplementation can confer neurocognitive benefit,” write researcher Robert Krikorian, of the University of Cincinnati Academic Health Center, and colleagues in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Researchers say blueberries contain a wealth of phytochemicals that have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects.

(WebMD, 1/21/10)

Use it or lose it!

Pilot study by Alzheimers Australia (WA) finds regular brain exercises are the key to healthy ageing

Just two hours of brain exercises a week can markedly improve a person’s mental capacity and help fight age-related memory loss according to a recent study by Alzheimer’s Australia WA.

· Participants found improvements in their memory and were able to follow conversations better.
· Brain has the ability to change in response to new learning.
· Exercising the brain reduces the risk of developing dementia in later years.

The “Brain Fitness Pilot Project” involved people aged in their 60s, 70s and 80s from retirement villages and seniors fitness centres, taking part in a structured brain fitness program two hours per week over an eight-week period.

The program consisted of a series of computer-based hearing exercises aimed at sharpening a person’s ability to take in speech so that the brain can hear and remember more details.

While a majority of participants reported an improvement in their train of thought and could remember names and shopping lists better, another 70 percent found an improvement in their hearing and their ability to follow and remember conversations.

Alzheimer’s Australia WA Chief Executive Officer Frank Schaper said the study demonstrated that a regular program of brain exercises will reduce the impact of cognitive decline as a person grows older and can lead to healthy ageing.

See original article here.

Persons with higher levels of leptin, a protein hormone produced by fat cells and involved in the regulation of appetite, may have an associated reduced incidence of Alzheimer disease and dementia, according to a study in the December 16 issue of JAMA.

Previous studies have shown that overweight and obesity in mid-life are associated with poorer cognitive function in the general population and an increased risk of dementia. There has been evidence that leptin exerts additional functions on the brain outside the hypothalamus (a region of the brain that controls body temperature, hunger, and thirst), according to background information in the article.

The researchers found that higher leptin levels were associated with a lower incidence of  dementia and AD. The incidence of dementia decreased gradually across increasing levels of leptin: a person with a baseline leptin level in the lowest quartile group had a 25 percent risk of developing AD after 12 years of follow-up, whereas the corresponding risk for a person in the top quartile group was only 6 percent.

“These findings are consistent with recent experimental data indicating that leptin improves memory function in animals through direct effects on the hippocampus and strengthens the evidence that leptin is a hormone with a broad set of actions in the central nervous system. Due to the exploratory character of the present analyses, we did not adjust for multiple comparisons and acknowledge that our findings require confirmation in independent samples,” the authors write.

“If our findings are confirmed by others, leptin levels in older adults may serve as one of several possible biomarkers for healthy brain aging and, more importantly, may open new pathways for possible preventive and therapeutic intervention. Further exploration of the molecular and cellular basis for the observed association may expand our understanding of the pathophysiology underlying brain aging and the development of AD.”
(JAMA 2009;302[23]:2565-2572. )

There’s more good news on the fish front: A large study conducted in developing countries found that a diet rich in fish may lower the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. And the more fish people ate, the less likely they were to develop the serious memory loss of dementia. The study adds to a growing body of evidence that a fish-rich diet may offer benefits for brain health.

Past research has suggested that eating fish may help to ward off dementia, but most of those studies were carried out in the United States other developed countries. Studies of people living in Italy, France and Spain who eat a traditional Mediterranean diet rich in fish as well as fruits and vegetables, for example, have shown that the diet may have brain-protective effects.

The findings are consistent with earlier reports that suggest that eating oily fish like tuna, salmon, mackerel, sardines and anchovies may help to keep the mind and memory sharp. Eating fish may also help to ease the agitation and depression of Alzheimers, other research shows.

Fish oils contain omega-3 fatty acids like EPA and DHA, which are known to be good for cardiovascular health. They also may help protect the brain against strokes and memory loss. DHA, or docosahexaenoic acid, and EPA, or eicosapentaenoic acid, are both thought to have disease-fighting properties.

In addition to fish, DHA and omega-3 dietary supplement pills are also widely available in pharmacies and health-food stores. Other foods high in these “good” fats include almonds, walnuts and many other types of nuts, as well as canola, walnut, soybean and flaxseed oils. Because many of these foods are a rich source of calories, however, it is best to eat them in place of, rather than in addition to, other foods.

See complete original article here

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.

A new study has found that Googling can consistently stimulate brain to slow or even reverse the age-related declines that can end in dementia.

Professor of neuroscience and human behavior at University of California, Los Angeles, Gary Small, observed 24 men and women aged between 55 and 78 to reach the conclusion. Half of the people were regular users of the net, while the remaining persons were not.

It was learned that the Internet stimulated the mind greater compared to reading, Timesonline reports. Also the effects of an Internet session apparently continued for a long period after it had ended.

During the research, the brains of the participants were scanned using a technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, while they conducted a series of searches on the web. The purpose of which was to measure changes in blood flow around the brain to figure out which was the most and least active parts of the brain.

The participants then went home where they surfed the internet to carry out specified tasks for an hour a day at least seven times over the following fortnight, after which another brain scan was done while using the net.

The researchers learned that the impacts began immediately, with the first scan demonstrating brain activity in regions controlling language, reading, memory and vision. However, the second scan result found that the activated areas had widened to the frontal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus, which are significant areas in working memory and decision-making. The researchers reached the conclusion that Internet searching stimulates brain cells and pathways, making them more active.

Teena Moody, a UCLA researcher who co- wrote the report with Small, said: “Searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults.” The research will be presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago.

ScienceDaily (Aug. 27, 2009) — Researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have found that rats use a mental instant replay of their actions to help them decide what to do next, shedding new light on how animals and humans learn and remember.

“By understanding how thoughts and memories are structured, we can gain insight into how they might be disrupted in diseases and disorders of memory and thought such as Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia,” said study author Matthew A. Wilson, the Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience at the Picower Institute. “This understanding may lead to new methods of diagnosis and treatment.”

Wilson’s laboratory explores how rats form and recall memories by recording — with an unprecedented level of accuracy — the activity of single neurons in the hippocampus while the animal is performing tasks, pausing between actions and sleeping. The hippocampus is the seahorse-shaped brain region researchers believe to be critical for learning and memory.

Wilson’s previous work has shown that after the animals run a maze, their brains “replay” during sleep the sequence of events they experienced while awake. Researchers believe this process is key to sleep-reinforced memory consolidation in both animals and humans.

The latest study shows that these sequences also occur when the animals are awake and may help them decide what to do next.

Not-so-instant replay

When a rat moves through a maze, certain neurons called “place cells,” which respond to the animal’s physical environment, fire in patterns and sequences unique to different locations. By looking at the patterns of firing cells, researchers can tell which part of the maze the animal is running.

While the rat is awake but standing still in the maze, its neurons fire in the same pattern of activity that occurred while it was running. The mental replay of sequences of the animals’ experience occurs in both forward and reverse time order.

“This may be the rat equivalent of ‘thinking,’” Wilson said. “This thinking process looks very much like the reactivation of memory that we see during non-REM dream states, consisting of bursts of time-compressed memory sequences lasting a fraction of a second.

“So, thinking and dreaming may share the same memory reactivation mechanisms,” he said.

Memory’s building blocks

“This study brings together concepts related to thought, memory and dreams that all potentially arise from a unified mechanism rooted in the hippocampus,” said co-author Fabian Kloosterman, senior postdoctoral associate.

The team’s results show that long experiences, which in reality could have taken tens of seconds or minutes, are replayed in only a fraction of a second. To do this, the brain links together smaller pieces to construct the memory of the long experience.

The researchers speculated that this strategy could help different areas of the brain share information — and deal with multiple memories that may share content — in a flexible and efficient way. “These results suggest that extended replay is composed of chains of shorter subsequences, which may reflect a strategy for the storage and flexible expression of memories of prolonged experience,” Wilson said.

Moreover, by comparing the content of the replay with the rat’s physical location on the track and his actual behavior immediately before and after the replay event the researchers could tell the rat was not just thinking about his most recent experience but also about other options, such as: “What if I turned around and went back the way I came?” or “How would I get here if my starting point is at a distant location?”

This suggests that the same brain mechanisms come into play to remember the past and consider future actions, reinforcing recent work by neuroscientists outside of MIT who determined that in humans, cognitive processes related to episodic recall and evaluation of future events overlap to a high degree.

Memory formation and future planning are among the cognitive functions ravaged by diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia and psychosis.

“A better understanding of how we use memories, not only to learn from past experiences but also to explore our future options, can give us insights into how the system fails under these disease conditions,” Kloosterman said.

The MIT researchers plan to further explore the link between awake replay and cognition in animals engaged in more cognitively demanding tasks such as those involving multiple choices, where the rat has to make a decision (”do I go left or right?”) based on a prior learned rule.

In addition to Wilson, the study was led jointly by Kloosterman and MIT brain and cognitive sciences graduate student Thomas J. Davidson.

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Original article here.