More complicated than that
Computerized brain-training is now the first intervention of any kind to reduce the risk of dementia among older adults.
Pensioners can reduce their risk of dementia by nearly a third by playing a computer brain training game similar to a driving hazard perception test, a new study suggests.
Speed of processing training turned out to be the big winner. After ten years, participants in this group—and only this group—had reduced rates of dementia compared to the controls
The research paper is here, and the abstract does indeed say “Speed training resulted in reduced risk of dementia compared to control, but memory and reasoning training did not”
They’re overselling it a bit. First, these are intervals showing the ratios of number of cases with and without the three types of treatment, including the uncertainty
Summarising this as “speed training works but the other two don’t” is misleading. There’s pretty marginal evidence that speed training is beneficial and even less evidence that it’s better than the other two.
On top of that, the results are for less than half the originally-enrolled participants, the ‘dementia’ they’re measuring isn’t a standard clinical definition, and this is a study whose 10-year follow-up ended in 2010 and that had a lot of ‘primary outcomes’ it was looking for — which didn’t include the one in this paper.
The study originally expected to see positive results after two years. It didn’t. Again, after five years, the study reported “Cognitive training did not affect rates of incident dementia after 5 years of follow-up.” Ten-year results reported in 2014, showed relatively modest differences in people’s ability to take care of themselves, as Hilda Bastian commented.
So. This specific type of brain training might actually help. Or one of the other sorts of brain training they tried might help. Or, quite possibly, none of them might help. On the other hand, these are relatively unlikely to be harmful, and maybe someone will produce an inexpensive app or something.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »