BRAIN TRAINING FOR SENIORS HAS LONG-TERM BENEFITS

Seniors who received brief training in cognitive areas, such as reasoning and mental processing, showed sustained improvement in those areas even after 10 years, according to a recent study reported in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and other facilities offered cognitive training sessions over five to six weeks to seniors averaging just over 73 years of age.  Each session lasted between an hour and an hour-and-fifteen minutes.

Participants in the reasoning groups were given instruction in problem solving and pattern recognition, and participants in the speed-of-processing groups were trained with a computer to quickly identify visual information.

After 10 years, improvement was still significant.  And participants who had received additional sessions during the first three years showed even greater improvement.

Memory training was also administered in the study, and sustained improvement was evident after five years, but leveled off at the 10-year mark.

For more information, see this report in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society: CLICK HERE