Good Q&A on Mild Cognitive Impairment

Cop­ing With Mild Cog­ni­tive Impair­ment (NYT blog): “About 10 to 15 per­cent of adults age 65 and old­er are believed to have mild cog­ni­tive impair­ment — a con­di­tion com­mon­ly char­ac­ter­ized by mem­o­ry prob­lems, well beyond those asso­ci­at­ed with nor­mal aging.… The Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to researchers set out to rectify 

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On Music, Dopamine, and Making Sense of Sound

Daniel Lev­itin, in This Is Your Brain On Music, sug­gests the fol­low­ing sound exper­i­ment. Sit­u­ate your­self some­place where you can close your eyes and focus on the sounds around you. When you open your eyes, write down each sound you heard and the object that made that sound. If you are in a rel­a­tive­ly quiet…

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The Future of Preventive Brain Medicine: Breaking Down the Cognition & Alzheimer’s Disease Alphabet Soup

As the pres­i­dent and med­ical direc­tor of the Alzheimer’s Research and Pre­ven­tion Foun­da­tion (ARPF), it’s my job to stay on top of advances in the field of Alzheimer’s research. Recent­ly, a num­ber of arti­cles in the med­ical lit­er­a­ture have caught my atten­tion. They are focused on a par­tic­u­lar ques­tion that con­cerns most Baby Boomers like…

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Let’s Define Brain Fitness and Physical Fitness

Bev­er­ly San­born, Vice Pres­i­dent of Pro­gram Devel­op­ment at Bel­mont Senior Liv­ing and sched­uled 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit Speak­er, could not final­ly speak at the Sum­mit (she was very well replaced by col­league Jeff DeBevec), but for­tu­nate­ly we can share her thought­ful answers to the fol­low­ing four crit­i­cal ques­tions. 1. How would you define “brain fit­ness” vs. “phys­i­cal fitness”?…

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Education AND Lifelong Cognitive Activities build Cognitive Reserve and Delay Memory Loss

In a recent­ly pub­lished sci­en­tif­ic study (see Hall C, et al “Cog­ni­tive activ­i­ties delay onset of mem­o­ry decline in per­sons who devel­op demen­tia” Neu­rol­o­gy 2009; 73: 356–361), Hall and col­leagues exam­ined how edu­ca­tion and stim­u­lat­ing activ­i­ties may inter­act to con­tribute to cog­ni­tive reserve. The study involved 488 ini­tial­ly healthy peo­ple, aver­age age 79, who enrolled…

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