Alzheimer’s disease is the elephant in the room that is not effectively being planned for or dealt with by the Government or the Health Care industry. Consider just a few stats - By 2050, 115M people will be afflicted with the disease primarily due to the simple fact of living longer than earlier generations.  The cost to Medicare and Medicaid is expected to be approx. $30 Trillion (yes that’s a T folks), which makes the current economic crisis and health care reform topics pale by comparative scale.  Further, the availability of research funds for the study of Alzheimer’s disease, related treatment, and preventative therapies is significantly smaller than the funds that are channeled towards cancer and heart disease today.

One glimmer of sunshine may be the recent Alzheimer’s Breakthrough Act that doubles the available funds for Alzheimer’s research at the National Institutes of Health. This is expected to save $61B of annual cost for Medicare and Medicaid within five years of a breakthrough. You can easily do the math and realize it’s a drop in the bucket on the expected financial toll the disease will take on us all.

Read about some of awareness that has been raised at this week’s World Alzheimer’s Day. Join the fight!

Last Saturday, August 1st, the 2009 Summer National Senior Games started in San Francisco. HAPPYneuron was proud to be present with its sponsoring partner Humana.

Senior Games, you’re saying? Surely, seniors can be active and do regular exercise but doesn’t the term “games” involve a competition? Are seniors actually able to compete in a sports competition?

The answer is yes, they are, and the Summer National Senior Games, also known as the Senior Olympics (the first edition took place in 1987) gives men and women age 50 and older the opportunity to compete in their favorite sport, just like proper athletes.

Like Vivian Stancil, 56, who is blind and has been swimming for years, thus losing 135 pounds and being able to compete at events like the Senior Olympics, the exercise making her feel much happier. Then, there is also Johnie, 82, and Dee, 78, Howard who have been playing tennis, even taking part in competitions, ever since they married in 1995!

The Senior Olympics does not merely provide excellent exercise for older adults but also provides something else very important: the opportunity to socialize and meet new people that share a common interest.

The Summer National Senior Games website gives excellent advice about preparation, training, and workout, all need to do is click on your sport -  whether you wish to try out for the 2011 Senior Olympics or  just for fun of keeping fit!

Do you have trouble remembering things? Of course, working on memory strategies can help a lot. But what if you even forget to do your memory workout? Now, with the new “Workout Reminders” feature, you can tell the HAPPYneuron Coach to email your personalized workout on a schedule that suits you.  You may never forget your brain workout again!

To schedule your workout reminder, Login and click “My Workout Reminders”. You can select as many days a week as you like and any type of workout. Of course, to be sure you receive your reminders, you may need to make coach@happy-neuron.com a ’safe recipient’ in your email program. The FAQ can tell you how for your particular email program.

As always, to see sustainable cognitive improvements, workouts are recommended up to 45 minutes, 3 times per week and continue for 10+ weeks. Staying on track with your cognitive workout program just got little easier.

Don’t forget to tell us if you like the feature.

As baby boomers approach retirement age, the field of cognitive fitness has begun to gain more prominence. In this interview with health blogger, David William, I speak about the magnitude of the economic impact of Alzheimer’s and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), the strategies that can be used to slow mental decline, and how HAPPYneuron is helping to educate the industry. Read here or Listen here….

Last week I spoke with Adrian Berg of the Longevity Club Radio Show about the HAPPYneuron cross training program, the history of brain science, the impact of technology on the effectiveness of the program and the resulting cognitive health benefits for life.  Listen on (about 5 minutes into the show).

They say that human beings are social animals. It seems intuitive (even for introverts!) that social contact has benefits. Obviously we need other people to fulfill basic needs such making sure that our genes outlive us. Maybe less obviously, we seem to need other people to maintain adequate levels of mental well-being and motivation. Even less obviously still, social contact may help us improve our brain functions…

Mental fitness seems to depend on a large part on being connected with other people. A study published in 2008 by Ybarra and his colleagues showed that socializing and mental exercises have very similar effects in terms of improving brain functions! Ybarra hypothesized that social interaction could facilitate cognitive functioning.

First, they collected data from 3600 people aged 24 to 96. They assessed how often these people talked on the phone with friends, neighbors and relatives and how often they got together with the same parties. They also assessed mental functioning of their sample using the mini-mental exam. It was found that the more socially engaged people were, the higher their cognitive performance. Great news, right? Stay connected and your neurons will stay healthy!

One limitation of this type of study is that is shows a CORRELATION. The result shows that people who are socially engaged are also doing well in terms of brain function. This does not mean that being socially engaged results or CAUSES good brain functioning.
This correlation can be interpreted in several ways:

1. being socially engaged results in good brain functioning
2. Good brain functioning results in being socially engaged
3. being wealthy (for instance) may result both in being socially engaged and good brain functioning

As a consequence, Ybarra and colleagues proceeded to conduct another study to show that social interaction indeed CAUSES better cognitive performance.
They randomly assigned participants (aged 18-21) to three groups:

1. a social group, in which the participants engaged in a discussion of a social issue for 10mn
2. an intellectual activities group, in which the participants solved stimulating tasks (crossword puzzles and the likes) for 10mn
3. a control group, in which the participants watched a 10mn clip of Seinfeld

After they participated in the discussion or watched the clip or solved the puzzles, the cognitive functioning of all the participants was assessed. Two tasks were used (for those you are interested: these were a speed of processing task and a working memory task). Here is what Ybarra et al. found:

• People in the intellectual activities group did better in the cognitive tasks than people who merely watched a movie. This shows one more time that stimulating your neurons is a great way to boost your performance

• People who were in the social group did better in the cognitive tasks than people who merely watched a movie. This is the first time that social interaction is shown to directly CAUSE better cognitive functioning. This is a very exciting result. Remember that participants engaged in discussion for only 10m!

The benefit from social interaction was as great as the benefit from intellectual activities.

Why would social interaction boost brain function?
Ybarra and colleagues offer the following reasoning. Social interaction involves many behaviors that require memory, attention and control. These mental processes are also involved in many cognitive tasks. Thus social interaction would act as a prime, it would “oil” these processes so that they are ready to be used when a cognitive task is to be solved. This is a tentative explanation that may require some refinement but the results are here! Social interaction seems to benefit the brain.

Read the original article:

Ybarra, O., Burnstein, E., Winkielman, P., Keller, M. C., Manis, M., Chan, E., & Rodriguez, J. (2008). Functioning Mental Exercising Through Simple Socializing: Social Interaction Promotes General Cognitive. Pers Soc Psychol Bull., 34, 248.

A few days ago I got quite a chuckle at an article on aging and memory by David Brooks of the New York Times and thought to share it with you. David claims this will be the Century of the Bad Memory and in the era of an aging population, memory is the new sex. To read the article you need to register (free) for online access to the New York times, but you are sure to relate to the article and  have a few chuckles in the process. Worth it if you consider that laughter is also a positive contributor to brain health. Read on here….

It is now well known that, for rodents, physical exercise is beneficial for brain health. Indeed, mice allowed to freely run on an exercise wheel grow more new neurons that mice not allowed to move freely. Importantly, these new neurons grow in an area crucial for memory formation: the hippocampus.

Neurogenesis (the birth and development of neurons) is difficult to estimate in the human brain as there are no way to directly count new neurons…
Recently, Small and his colleagues (2007) were able to use neuroimaging to study the effect of physical exercise on neurogenesis in humans. Their study involved a group of 11 middle-aged adults who had been exercising about four times a week, for three months. Results show exercise-related changes in the hippocampus, suggesting neurogenesis in this area.

This new study adds to the numerous results showing that physical exercise is good for the brain. Let’s keep moving then!

Read the original article here.
Read a report on the original article here.

Young brains are plastic. This means that they can change and reorganize to adapt to deficits. Is it the case for older brains as well? Recent research suggests that the answer is yes!

Dilks, from John Hopkins University, and his colleagues, studied the brain of a stroke patient (B.L.). Behavioral and brain imaging evidence showed that reorganization had occurred in B.L.’s visual cortex following his stroke. This study, published in September 2007, was the first to show plasticity in this part of the adult brain.

Evidence for plasticity in the adult brain is great news for brain fitness! Healthy and fit brains may be more plastic, and thus more resistant to deficits caused by age and age-related diseases.
So… keep exercising your brain!

Read the original article here