This Tool Could Help Prevent Dementia

With dementia now estimated to impact 42 percent of people who make it past age 55, everyone should be taking steps to help decrease their risk for developing the condition. Yet while much of the conversation focuses on supplements, diet, and pharmaceuticals, one of the less publicized tools to mitigate risk could be one of the most important.

For background, it’s key to understand that, as it relates to dementia, brain changes can begin decades before a person experiences symptoms of cognitive decline. Yet not all people with dementia-related changes in their brains experience clinical dementia, and there are major differences in the severity of cognitive impairment, even in people with similar brain pathology (like amyloid buildup). But why?

A major breakthrough in unpacking this complexity came from a 1994 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). In this publication, Yaakov Stern and his co-investigators looked at about 600 healthy adults aged 60 years or older and followed them for up to four years to look for the development of dementia. They discovered that people who had more formal education or more complex occupations had a significantly lower chance (less than half) of developing dementia. They proposed that “increased educational and occupational attainment may reduce the risk of incident [Alzheimer’s disease], either by decreasing ease of clinical detection of AD or by imparting a reserve that delays the onset of clinical manifestations.”

This early work has since been expanded, and the framework described by the early work is now classified as “cognitive reserve” (CR). There is now an increased understanding that multiple methods of expanding brain connectivity and even growth of new brain cells could help to delay or potentially even offset the risk of developing dementia. Many now recommend various steps to help raise CR, which, in addition to pursuing formal education and engaging in cognitively demanding tasks (e.g., a complex job), include certain leisure activities, exercise, and social engagement.

It is important to note that the brain protection associated with higher CR isn’t necessarily a prevention of dementia itself, but rather, may promote a delayed decline. Research recently published in the journal Neurology suggests that having higher CR leads to a slowing of progression in stages of brain decline that precede a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, potentially compressing the cognitive impairment into a shorter period of time after dementia is present. With all this in mind, what are practical strategies to help boost CR?

1. Lifelong Learning: Education is one of the strongest contributors to CR. Higher educational attainment is linked to a significantly lower dementia risk in many studies, including up to a 44 percent reduction in some data. Importantly, this isn’t just about early life schooling. Learning later in life is an excellent step to continue to promote CR.
2. Cognitive Training: In one of the largest trials of its type, researchers in the ACTIVE Cognitive Training Trial tested whether 10 sessions of cognitive training (plus boosters after 11 and 35 months) could lead to improvements in cognition in around 3,000 people. They found that reasoning and speed training led to improvements in brain function observable 10 years later.
3. Physical Activity: Regular physical activity may be the most important daily activity for promoting brain health, but, specific to cognitive reserve, aerobic and resistance exercises may be especially beneficial for growing brain cells and protecting against dementia. One of the most striking examples is a 2011 study showing that one year of exercise (specifically walking) appeared to grow the brain’s memory center (the hippocampus).
4. Social Engagement: Strong and positive social interactions have been consistently linked with better brain health, but how? In a 2021 publication, researchers compared people’s social networks to brain imaging (MRI) testing. They found that people with more ability to span social roles had better cognitive testing and that this was linked to slowing of atrophy in parts of the brain linked to social processing.
5. Novelty: Our brains are tasked with responding to an incredible diversity of environmental inputs. However, consistently challenging ourselves with new experiences may be a way to beneficially augment this process to boost CR. To this end, learning a new instrument or a new language, traveling, or picking up a new hobby are great ways to inject novelty into your life.                                                                                       

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Transcendental meditation correlated with specific changes in the brain

A new study conducted at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca shows that the subjective feeling of well-being experienced by many people with the practice of meditation is correlated with specific changes in the brain.

The research, which appeared in Brain and Cognition, examined the effects of the technique known as Transcendental Meditation (TM), which consists in the silent repetition of a meaningless sound, a "mantra".

For the study, conducted at the Molecular Mind Laboratory (MoMiLab) of IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, the researchers enrolled 34 healthy young volunteers and divided them in two groups. The first one practiced Transcendental Meditation 40 minutes per day in two sessions of 20 minutes each, one in the morning and the other in the evening; the second group did not change its daily routine.

At the beginning of the study, the researchers also measured through psychometric questionnaires the anxiety and stress level of all the participants, as well as their ability to manage stressful situations. Each individual was also subjected to a functional magnetic resonance imaging test (fMRI), in order to measure brain activity at rest and changes in the functional connectivity among different cerebral areas. After three months, at the end of the study, the same tests were repeated.

The analysis of the data clearly showed that levels of anxiety and stress perceived by the subjects who followed the meditation program were significantly reduced in comparison with those of the volunteers who did not practice TM.

Magnetic resonance imaging also shows that the reduction of anxiety levels is associated with specific changes in the connectivity between different cerebral areas, such as precuneus, left parietal lobe and insula, which all have an important role in the modulation of emotions and inner states. In the control group, instead, none of these changes was observed".    Giulia Avvenuti, Ph.D. fellow at IMT School and first author of the study.

"The fact that Transcendental Meditation has measurable effects on the 'dialogue' between brain structures involved in the modulation of affective states opens new perspectives for the understanding of brain-mind relationships" says Pietro Pietrini, IMT School's Director and coordinator of the study. "It also extends the results of recent research suggesting that drugs therapies and psychotherapy leverage on the same biological mechanism".

Transcendental Meditation has recently gained an increasing success worldwide as a relaxation practice also thanks to the David Lynch Foundation, which co-financed the study along with the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca. Founded in 2005 by the movie director David Lynch, who is himself a longtime practitioner and supporter of the social value of Transcendental Meditation, the David Lynch Foundation promotes TM practice as an approach to reduce stress in schools (as for the 'Quiet Time-Meditate Lucca' project at the Pertini High School) and workplaces, and to build resilience in victims of trauma.

"I am very happy of the results of this study that used the latest technology to show the beautiful benefits for the human beings of TM. Now I'm working to form my foundation also in Italy, with teachers who teach transcendental meditation in schools, work places and other groups, reaching as many people as possible" says David Lynch.

This new study, coherently with previous ones, shows that even a few months of practice of Transcendental Meditation have positive effects on psychological well-being and that these effects are correlated with measurable changes in the brain.

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.     

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It's not just hormones, the way teenagers behave !

A teenage girl is a force of nature, with emotions so powerful they shock even her. In this exclusive excerpt, psychotherapist Lisa Damour uses neuroscience to help parents – and anyone perplexed by teenage girls – understand what’s really going on in their heads 

 The following is an excerpt from the book Untangled by Lisa Damour, Ph.D.

 

When I was in my first semester of graduate school, the professor teaching my psychological testing course handed me a stack of Rorschach inkblot tests to score. Before sending me on my way, he offhandedly said, “Double-check the age of the person whose test you are scoring. If it’s a teenager, but you think it’s a grown-up, you’ll conclude that you have a psychotic adult. But that’s just a normal teenager.” 

Twenty years later, I don’t need to score inkblot tests to know that healthy teenage development can look pretty irrational. Parents tell me about it every day. They describe how a minor annoyance – such as when a girl finds out that the jeans she wants are still riding out the rinse cycle – can turn into an emotional earthquake that knocks everyone in the house off balance. 

The sudden force of a teenager’s feelings can catch parents off guard because, between the ages of six and 11, children go through a phase of development that psychologists call latency . As the term implies, the mercurial moods of early childhood simmer down and girls are pretty easygoing until they become teenagers and their emotions kick up again. Recent developments in brain science offer new insight into why latency ends when it does. 

Though we used to assume that the brain stopped developing somewhere around age 12, we now know that the brain remodels dramatically during the teenage years. The renovation project follows the pattern in which the brain grew in the womb. It starts with the lower, primal portions (the limbic system) then moves to the upper, outer areas (the cortex), where the functions that separate humans from other animals live. 

Updates to the limbic system heighten the brain’s emotional reactions with research indicating that the feeling centres beneath the cortex are actually more sensitive in teens than in children or adults. For example, one straightforward study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to watch teenage brains respond, in real time, to emotional input. The research team showed images of fearful, happy and calm faces to children, teens and adults while monitoring the activity of the amygdala, a key player in the emotional reactions of the limbic system. Compared to the brain activity of children and adults, the teens’ amygdalas reacted strongly to fearful or happy faces. In other words, emotional input rings like a gong for teenagers and a chime for everyone else. 

With the lower-to-higher remodelling of the brain, the frontal cortex – the part of the brain that exerts a calming, rational influence – doesn’t come fully online until adulthood. This means that limbic system reactions outstrip frontal cortex controls. Put simply, intense emotions burst through and introduce you, and your daughter, to a new period of emotional upheaval. 

Adults often tell teens that their feelings are at full blast because of “hormones.” This usually doesn’t go over very well, plus it’s probably inaccurate. Despite the obvious coincidence between the beginnings of puberty – with its acne, growth spurts, and dawning smelliness – and the intensification of your daughter’s emotions, research suggests that the impact of pubertal hormones on teenagers’ moods is indirect, at best. 

In fact, studies find that hormones respond to, or may even be trumped by, other factors that influence your daughter’s mood, such as stressful events or the quality of her relationship with you. 

In other words, the changes in your daughter’s brain and the events that occur around her are more likely to shape her mood than the hormonal shifts occurring inside of her. 

Here’s the bottom line: What your daughter broadcasts matches what she actually experiences. Really, it’s just that intense, so take her feelings seriously, regardless of how overblown they might seem. Parents who are surprised by their daughter’s dramatic ups and downs can lose sight of the fact that she is pretty shocked, too. 

So if your teenage daughter is developing normally, you are living with someone who secretly worries that she is crazy and who might have the psychological assessment results of a psychotic adult. 

And we might as well add that you are living with a girl whose key support system – her tribe – consists of peers who are also as reactive and erratic as they will ever be. Your daughter works hard every day to harness powerful and unpredictable emotions so that she can get on with doing everything else she means to do. 

To manage all of that intensity and to keep from feeling crazy, she’ll recruit your help. Depending on the moment, she might ask for your support directly, she might unload her feelings on you or she might find a way for you to have a feeling on her behalf. 

Sometimes you’ll recognize the role you are being asked to play, other times you’ll only appreciate your part in retrospect, if at all. Understanding your daughter’s efforts to harness emotions will allow you to maintain your sanity while you’re busy helping her feel confident in her own. 

Teenagers often manage their feelings by dumping the uncomfortable ones on their parents, so don’t be surprised if you find that the arrival of adolescence comes with a surge in complaining. No parents enjoy listening to their daughter’s endless stream of complaints, but it’s a lot easier to stand if we appreciate that her griping serves a valuable purpose. 

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