Seniors May Want to Play Challenging Brain Games

A new study out of Canada suggests a tangible piece of advice for seniors worried about dementia: Skip the online solitaire or Candy Crush and find a challenging brain game instead. In a 10-week study of 92 adults age 65 and older, researchers found that those who completed 30 minutes a day of relatively intensive cognitive training showed a 2.3% increase in acetylcholine, a key brain chemical tied to attention and memory. The figure is notable because people typically see a 2.5% decrease per decade with normal aging, study author Etienne de Villers-Sidani of McGill University tells NPR.

"The training restored cholinergic health to levels typically seen in someone 10 years younger," says de Villers-Sidani in a release at Science Daily. Participants were split into two groups: one played casual computer games like solitaire, and the other used games from BrainHQ, one of several sources of such games online. A typical game might ask people to remember items that appear and disappear with increasing speed. Brain scans using a specialized PET technique showed no acetylcholine change in the first group, but a measurable bump in the second.

"It was compelling enough that I thought, 'Maybe I need to be doing this,'" says Michael Hasselmo, director of the Center for Systems Neuroscience at Boston University, who was not involved in the research. In a post at Psychology Today, another expert not involved in the study—Michael Merzenich of the University of California, San Francisco—puts it this way: "While more work needs to be done, this breakthrough study strikes me as a turning point in how we approach many cognitive conditions." Larger and longer studies will be needed, however, to confirm real-world benefits.