Video Game May Help Keep Aging Brains Sharp

Older gamers may gain more mentally than crossword puzzle solvers, study suggests

By Maureen Salamon

HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, May 1 (HealthDay News) -- Keeping the brain nimble in older adulthood may be as simple as playing a video game, according to researchers who compared the thought-process benefits of crossword puzzles with a computer program that increased users' mental speed and agility.

Analyzing 681 healthy people aged 50 and up, scientists found that those who played a "Road Tour" video game for at least 10 hours -- which required them to identify "vehicles" among an ever-faster array -- gained at least three years of cognitive (mental skill) improvement after one year. A group that received four additional hours of training with the game improved their thinking abilities by four years.

"The bad news about brain plasticity is that . . . we start slowing down in our early 30s and it continues. The good news is, with the right kind of training programs, we can regain what we've lost and maybe get people to higher levels," said study author Fredric Wolinsky, a professor of public health at the University of Iowa.

"It seems some remodeling of the brain is taking place, but we need to figure out exactly which parts of the brain are undergoing functional improvements," added Wolinsky, who has no financial stake in the video game used in the research.

The study is published May 1 in the journal PLoS ONE.

Wolinsky and his team split participants into four groups, further separating them into sets of those 50 to 64 and those over 65. One group was given computerized crossword puzzles and the three other groups repeatedly used the Road Tour game.

The video game centers on quickly identifying a type of vehicle and matching its symbol with the correct road sign among a circular array of possibilities. The player must succeed three out of every four tries to advance to the next level, which speeds up the process and adds more distractions.

Participants who played the video game scored significantly higher than those in the crossword puzzle group on tests involving executive function such as concentration, agile shifting from one mental task to another, and information processing speed. The mental improvement in the video game group ranged from 1.5 to nearly seven years compared to those doing crossword puzzles, the investigators found.

Wolinsky noted that many other brain-training games are available commercially, though few have scientific evidence to back up their cognitive improvement claims. Road Tour forces users to widen their field of vision in order to take in all the information required to succeed, he said.

"There's been considerable assumption that the visual field of view, the amount of area we take in, declines with age," he said. "For people to visualize the center and periphery requires them to shift their field of view to capture more information, and the training helps them be more successful at doing that. It's a retrainable skill."

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Scientists May Have Spotted Brain's 'Numbers Center'

THURSDAY, April 18 (HealthDay News) -- The area of the brain that's activated when people look at numerals such as "7" and "60" has been pinpointed by researchers.

This spot is only about one-fifth of an inch across and consists of 1 million to 2 million nerve cells in the inferior temporal gyrus, the Stanford University School of Medicine researchers said.

The inferior temporal gyrus is known to be involved in the processing of visual information.

Researchers also found that, relative to neighboring areas, activity in this newly identified spot substantially decreased when people viewed numbers that were spelled out ("one" instead of "1"), homophones ("won" instead of "1") or false fonts in which a number or letter had been altered.

"This is the first-ever study to show the existence of a cluster of nerve cells in the human brain that specializes in processing numerals," Dr. Josef Parvizi, an associate professor of neurology and neurological sciences and director of Stanford's human intracranial cognitive electrophysiology program, said in a school news release.

"In this small nerve-cell population, we saw a much bigger response to numerals than to very similar-looking, similar-sounding and similar-meaning symbols," he explained.

The study in the April 17 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience could open the door to further discoveries about how math is processed in the brain, the news release suggested. It may also help researchers find new ways to help people with dyslexia for numbers and those unable to process numerical information, a disorder called dyscalculia.

Parvizi added that the finding is "a dramatic demonstration of our brain circuitry's capacity to change in response to education. No one is born with the innate ability to recognize numerals."

-- Robert Preidt
Copyright © 2013 HealthDay. All rights reserved. SOURCE: Stanford University, news release, April 16, 2013

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Study: Low Blood Pressure May Weaken Brains of Some Heart Patients

Pressure that's too low -- or too high -- might damage brain cells, new research suggests

By Steven Reinberg

HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, June 10 (HealthDay News) -- People suffering from cardiovascular disease who have lower-than-normal blood pressure may face a higher risk of brain atrophy -- the death of brain cells or connections between brain cells, Dutch researchers report.

Such brain atrophy can lead to Alzheimer's disease or dementia in these patients. In contrast, similar patients with high blood pressure can slow brain atrophy by lowering their blood pressure, the researchers added.

Blood pressure is measured using two readings. The top number, called systolic pressure, gauges the pressure of blood moving through arteries. The bottom number, called diastolic pressure, measures the pressure in the arteries between heartbeats. Normal blood pressure for adults is less than 120/80, according to the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

For the study, 70 to 90 was considered normal diastolic blood pressure, while under 70 was considered low.

"Our data might suggest that patients with cardiovascular disease represent a subgroup within the general population in whom low diastolic blood pressure might be harmful," said researcher Dr. Majon Muller, an epidemiologist and geriatrician at VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam.

On the other hand, lowering blood pressure in people with high blood pressure might slow brain atrophy, she said.

"Our findings could imply that blood pressure lowering is beneficial in patients with higher blood pressure levels, but one should be cautious with further blood pressure lowering in patients who already have low diastolic blood pressure," Muller added.

The report was published in the June 10 online edition of JAMA Neurology.

A U.S. expert noted the complex effects of blood pressure levels on the brain.

"High blood pressure has been shown to increase the risk of vascular brain lesions and brain atrophy. Trials of blood pressure lowering in patients with hypertension have shown reduced risk of brain lesions," said Dr. Gregg Fonarow, a professor of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a spokesman for the American Heart Association.

However, in patients with hypertension, the relationship between the levels of systolic and diastolic blood pressure and brain atrophy has been less clear, he said.

This new study suggests that low diastolic blood pressure levels were associated with brain atrophy regardless of blood pressure levels after patients developed dementia, Fonarow said.

"These findings suggest that while treatment and control of high blood pressure is very important for brain and cardiovascular health, caution is needed in patients who have low diastolic blood pressure levels," he said.

To see what changes blood pressure would make in the progression of brain atrophy, Muller's group studied 663 patients who suffered from heart disease, cardiovascular disease, peripheral artery disease or abdominal aortic aneurysm. The average age of participants was 57 and most were men.

People whose diastolic blood pressure was below 70 had more brain atrophy over time, the study found. For people with higher-than-normal blood pressure, brain atrophy decreased when their blood pressure did. When blood pressure rose, however, atrophy increased.

Another expert, Dr. Sam Gandy, associate director of the Mount Sinai Alzheimer's Disease Research Center in New York City, said that the finding "is an important cautionary tale."

"This implies that one must adapt the approach to the individual patient. Correction of hypertension is helpful, but reducing blood pressure in patients with normal blood pressure is risky and complicated," Gandy said.

Although the study found an association between low diastolic blood pressure and the risk of developing brain atrophy for people with artery disease, it did not establish a cause-and-effect relationship.

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How Ritalin Affects Brains of Kids With ADHD

Medication activates areas associated with the disorder, scans show

By Barbara Bronson Gray

HealthDay Reporter

FRIDAY, May 31 (HealthDay News) -- Ritalin activates specific areas of the brain in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), mimicking the brain activity of children without the condition, a new review says.

"This suggests that Ritalin does bring the brain [of a child with ADHD] back to the brain the typically developing kid has," said study author Constance Moore, associate director of the translational center for comparative neuroimaging at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Analyzing data from earlier studies that looked at how children's brains were affected by doing certain tasks that are sometimes challenging for kids with ADHD, the researchers found that Ritalin (methylphenidate) was having a visible impact on three areas of the brain known to be associated with ADHD: the cortex, the cerebellum and the basal ganglia.

The study could be helpful in diagnosing and treating children with ADHD, Moore said. "It may be helpful to know that in certain children, Ritalin is having a physiological effect in the areas of the brain involved with attention and impulse control," she said.

The research was published recently in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry.

Nine studies analyzed by the researchers used functional MRI to evaluate brain changes after children had taken a single dose of Ritalin. The children were involved in different types of tasks that tested their ability to focus and inhibit an impulse to act.

For example, to observe the brain's reaction during a test of what is called "inhibitory control," a child was told that every time he saw a zero show up on a screen, he should push the button on the right; every time he saw an X appear, he should push the left button. The children would then be asked to flip their responses, pushing the left button when they saw a zero.

"That's hard to do," Moore said, "because you've developed the habit [of pushing the other button], so you have to suppress your impulse. If you do 20 zeros and keep pressing and then you see an X, most kids with ADHD will hit the wrong button."

In three out of five of the inhibitory control studies, Ritalin at least partially normalized brain activation in ADHD children.

To note how the brain reacted to a selective attention test, Moore said, children would first be asked, for example, what word they were seeing. The word would be "red," and the color of the type also would be red. Then they would be shown the word "red," but the color of the type would be green. In several studies, Ritalin affected activation in the frontal lobes during such inhibitory control tasks.

Most of the studies included in the review were performed in the United States or the United Kingdom. The majority of participants were adolescent boys, and all studies compared their results to healthy children of the same approximate age.

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