nursing-homes

I wrote this arti­cle for the March/ April edi­tion of the pub­li­ca­tion Aging Today, pub­lished by the Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging, and received per­mis­sion to repro­duce it here.

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In recent years, most pro­fes­sion­als in aging have become aware of the grow­ing sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence show­ing that human brains retain the abil­i­ty to gen­er­ate neu­rons and change over a life­time, dis­cov­er­ies that have bro­ken the sci­en­tif­ic par­a­digm preva­lent dur­ing the 20th cen­tu­ry. Fur­ther­more, neu­roimag­ing and cog­ni­tive train­ing stud­ies are show­ing how well-direct­ed exer­cise presents peo­ple major oppor­tu­ni­ties for healthy brain aging.

How can peo­ple use emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies to keep their brains healthy and pro­duc­tive as long as pos­si­ble? An emerg­ing mar­ket for brain health– $225 mil­lion mar­ket in 2007, in the Unit­ed States alone, of which con­sumers account for $80 million–is try­ing to address that ques­tion in a way that com­ple­ments oth­er impor­tant more tra­di­tion­al pil­lars (and mul­ti-bil­lion indus­tries) of brain health, such as phys­i­cal exer­cise, bal­anced diet, stress man­age­ment (stress has been shown to actu­al­ly kill neu­rons and reduce the rate of cre­ation of new ones) and over­all men­tal stim­u­la­tion and life­long learning.

2007 AN ACTIVE YEAR

A series of impor­tant events took place in 2007, a sem­i­nal year for the brain health field, begin­ning in Jan­u­ary when many main­stream media pub­li­ca­tions, such as Time Mag­a­zine and CBS News, start­ed to pub­lish major sto­ries on neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty and brain exer­cise. This media cov­er­age fol­lowed the pub­li­ca­tion of the long-await­ed results from nation­al clin­i­cal tri­als show­ing that sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­ages of the par­tic­i­pants age 65 and old­er who trained for five weeks improved their mem­o­ry, rea­son­ing and infor­ma­tion-pro­cess­ing speed. Find­ings from the Advanced Cog­ni­tive Train­ing for Inde­pen­dent and Vital Elder­ly (ACTIVE) Study appeared in the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion (Dec. 20, 2006) and revealed that even after five years, par­tic­i­pants in the ACTIVE com­put­er-based pro­gram showed less of a decline in infor­ma­tion-pro­cess­ing skills than those in a con­trol group that received no cog­ni­tive training.

[Read more…] about Brain Health Busi­ness Grows With Research and Demand