Dehydration Impairs Attention in Middle-Aged Adults

 Is your competent? doctor making sure you are properly hydrated before you are given any cognitive test?

Dehydration Impairs Attention in Middle-Aged Adults

Summary: Mild dehydration can impair sustained attention in middle-aged and older adults, though it doesn’t affect other cognitive functions. The study involved 78 adults, ages 47 to 70, and assessed their hydration levels and cognitive performance.

Results showed that dehydration, common during typical daily activities, reduced attention span over 14 minutes. The findings highlight the need for regular hydration to maintain cognitive function in older adults.

Key Facts:

• Mild dehydration impairs sustained attention in middle-aged and older adults.
• Study participants aged 47-70 showed reduced attention span over 14 minutes when dehydrated.
• Proper hydration is essential for maintaining cognitive function, particularly sustained attention.

Source: Pennsylvania State University

Dehydration can lead to a wide array of mild to severe symptoms, from temporary inconveniences on mood to life-threatening concerns. Researchers in the Penn State Department of Biobehavioral Health studied how dehydration affects cognitive performance.

They found that even mild dehydration can diminish a person’s ability to pay attention to tasks over time. The findings underscore the importance of proper hydration to the healthy functioning of people as they age.

The research team found that typical dehydration—the levels of dehydration that occur during nonstrenuous, everyday activities—reduced individuals’ abilities to pay attention for tasks over 14 minutes but did not have any significant effect on other executive functions, such as working memory.

The results also raise concerns for the breadth of impacts on people’s physiological and cognitive health, Rosinger noted, especially for those without reliable access to safe water. Credit: Neuroscience News

The results were published in the American Journal of Human Biology.

Led by Asher Rosinger, associate professor of biobehavioral health and anthropology and director of the Water, Health and Nutrition Lab, and Kyle Murdock, associate professor of biobehavioral health, the researchers assessed 78 adults, aged 47 to 70 years old, all of whom had adequate access to safe drinking water, three times over three months.

“We chose to study middle-aged and older adults because this is the age group where we start to see risk of cognitive decline,” Rosinger said.

Previous research has raised concerns about the impact of dehydration on cellular health, kidney function, biological acceleration of age, risk of chronic disease and early mortality. It has also produced mixed results on cognitive performance, according to Rosinger.

Unlike previous studies that induced participants’ dehydration, this study did not manipulate hydration status and instead assessed ad libitum dehydration—adults’ naturally occurring dehydration from real-life, typical functions.

Participants were asked to avoid high-fat foods, caffeine and exercise on the days they were assessed to capture their level of dehydration without these influences.

To determine hydration status, the researchers analyzed the balance of dissolved particles, such as sodium or potassium, and water—called serum osmolality—in blood samples from each participant at three time points.

In Rosinger’s study, adults with serum osmolality over 300 milliosmoles per kilogram were defined as dehydrated. Dehydrated individuals experienced diminished ability to sustain attention. At each assessment, at least 29% and up to 39.1% of the group was dehydrated.

During each assessment, study participants completed surveys and four neurological tests that measured their inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility and sustained attention. The researchers found that the more dehydrated the participant, the worse they did on the sustained attention task.

“This suggests that if a person is, on a daily basis, drinking less water than their body needs, it may take them slightly longer to complete certain long tasks with slightly more errors,” Rosinger said.

The results did not indicate any significant connection between dehydration and inhibition, working memory or cognitive flexibility.

“The good news is that dehydration was only associated with poorer performance for tasks requiring sustained attention,” Rosinger said.

“It shows that in daily life when adults are not experimentally dehydrated—such as sitting in a sauna or going for an hour bike ride without drinking water—their cognitive performance on short tasks is not different than those who are better hydrated.”

The study’s primary finding of dehydration only impacting longer tasks has daily implications. Because job responsibilities are often tasks needing sustained attention without breaks in-between, Rosinger emphasizes that hydration is key for proper cognitive function for these kinds of tasks.

“It is important that older adults drink water regularly,” Rosinger said. “This will improve their ability to maintain sustained attention, and it might give them a boost when they’re at work when they’re reading that email from a colleague that drones on and on but includes action items or when they are just doing an intense version of the daily crossword with their friends.”

Rosinger explained that more awareness regarding hydration could benefit this population, especially as prior Penn State research revealed that, as people age, their feeling of thirst in response to dehydration gradually decreases.

“The relationship between hydration and cognitive performance is particularly important in middle-aged and older adults given that they are more vulnerable to dehydration,” Rosinger said. “They start to drink less water.”

The results also raise concerns for the breadth of impacts on people’s physiological and cognitive health, Rosinger noted, especially for those without reliable access to safe water.

“A big part of my research career has been spent trying to understand the coping strategies individuals and households employ to meet their water needs when they don’t have access to clean water and the resulting health consequences or trade-offs,” said Rosinger, who studies water insecurity and challenges with water accessibility in addition to hydration needs.

“One of the things I’ve seen is that they often will either restrict the amount of water they consume or switch to less healthy beverages that they perceive are safer, like sugary drinks.”

Rosinger said he plans to continue investigating how hydration impacts adults who are vulnerable to dehydration, with the ultimate goal of improving access to clean, healthy and trustworthy water people can use to meet their water needs.

His future work aims to understand how extreme climatic events and climate change affect access to clean water and how interventions can be applied to improve health and well-being.

“This issue is going to be increasingly important as temperatures increase under future climatic scenarios, which will increase water needs,” Rosinger said. “I would recommend older adults pay attention—pun intended—to how much water they consume.”

About this cognition and aging research news

Author: Emily Eng
Source: Penn State
Contact: Emily Eng – Penn State
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News

Original Research: Open access.
“Ad libitum dehydration is associated with poorer performance on a sustained attention task but not other measures of cognitive performance among middle‐to‐older aged community‐dwelling adults: A short‐term longitudinal study” by Asher Y. Rosinger et al. American Journal of Human Biology

Bright Light, Sharper Mind: Lighting Affects Cognition

When your doctor tests your cognition post stroke will they at least not bias the results by providing good lighting?

 Bright Light, Sharper Mind: Lighting Affects Cognition

Summary: A new study explores how different light levels impact cognitive function by influencing hypothalamic activity in the brain. The study utilized advanced 7 Tesla fMRI to show that higher levels of light improve cognitive performance during complex tasks.

This link between light exposure and brain function suggests potential for light-based therapies to enhance alertness and cognitive abilities throughout the day. The findings pave the way for further investigation into how light affects various brain structures and could inform the development of non-invasive treatments for cognitive fatigue and sleep disorders.

Key Facts:

1. Higher levels of light exposure were correlated with increased activity in the posterior hypothalamus and improved performance on cognitive tasks.
2. The study used 7 Tesla fMRI, providing high-resolution insights into how light influences hypothalamic activity.
3. While increased light levels boosted cognitive performance, the exact neural mechanisms and involved brain regions require further exploration.

Source: eLife

Exposure to higher levels of light can help people feel more awake and increase cognitive performance, probably by influencing the activity of parts of a brain region called the hypothalamus, according to new research. 

The study, published today as a Reviewed Preprint in eLife, is described by the editors as of fundamental importance, and represents a key advancement to our understanding of how different levels of light affect human behaviour.

They found that, during both tasks, higher levels of light triggered an increase in activity over the posterior hypothalamus. In contrast, the inferior and anterior hypothalamus followed a seemingly opposite pattern, exhibiting decreased activity under higher levels of light. Credit: Neuroscience News

The strength of evidence is praised as compelling, supporting the authors’ analyses of the complex interplay between light exposure, hypothalamic activity, and cognitive function. 

With further research, the findings could be used to inform various light therapy treatments to increase an individual’s quality of sleep and affective state, and help them feel more awake and perform tasks better throughout the day. 

The biological effects of light exposure have been well documented in recent years. Higher illuminance has been shown to stimulate alertness and cognitive performance. These effects primarily rely on a subclass of light-sensitive cells in the retina, called ipRCGs.

These cells project to multiple areas of the brain, but projections are most densely found within the hypothalamus, which is typically associated with the regulation of circadian rhythms, sleep and alertness, and cognitive functions.

However, this knowledge of the brain circuitry underlying the biological effects of light has almost entirely stemmed from studies in animals.

“Translating findings on how light exposure affects the brain in animal models to humans is a difficult process, as the later maturation of the cortex in human beings enables much more complex cognitive processing,” explains lead author Islay Campbell, former PhD student at the GIGA-CRC Human Imaging – now awarded her doctorate – University of Liège, Belgium.

“In particular, the question of whether hypothalamus nuclei contribute to the stimulating impact of light on cognition is not established.”

To better understand the impact of light on human cognition, Campbell and colleagues recruited 26 healthy young adults to participate in their study.

They asked each participant to complete two auditory cognitive tasks; an executive task modified from the ‘n-back task’ in which participants were asked to determine whether a current sound was identical to the one they heard two items earlier, or contained the letter ‘K’; and an emotional task, in which participants were asked to identify the gender of a voice that was either pronounced in a neutral tone or in an angry tone.

Each task was completed whilst the individuals were alternatively placed in darkness, or exposed to short periods of light in four levels of illumination.

The team used a technique called 7 Tesla functional magnetic resonance imaging, which has a higher resolution and signal-to-noise ratio compared with standard 3 Tesla MRI, to assess the impact of the different light levels on the activity of the hypothalamus during the tasks. 

They found that, during both tasks, higher levels of light triggered an increase in activity over the posterior hypothalamus. In contrast, the inferior and anterior hypothalamus followed a seemingly opposite pattern, exhibiting decreased activity under higher levels of light. 

Next, the team sought to determine whether these changes in regional hypothalamus activity were related to a change in cognitive performance. They focused on assessing the participants’ performance during the executive task, as this required a higher level of cognition to solve.

Their analysis revealed that higher levels of light indeed led to better performance in the task, indicating an increase in cognitive performance. Importantly, the increase in cognitive performance under higher illuminance was found to be significantly negatively correlated with the activity of the posterior hypothalamus.

This makes it unlikely that the posterior hypothalamus activity directly mediates the positive impact of light on cognitive performance, and possibly hints at other brain regions being involved, requiring further research.

On the other hand, the activity of the posterior hypothalamus was found to be associated with an increased behavioural response to the emotional task. This suggests the association between cognitive performance and the activity of the posterior hypothalamus may be context dependent – in some tasks, certain hypothalamus nuclei or neuronal populations may be recruited to increase performance, but not in others. 

The authors call for future work in this area to assess the impact of light on other structures, or entire networks of the brain to determine how varying light levels modify their crosstalk and interactions with the cortex to bring about behavioural changes. 

“The questions that remain from our study are important to answer, because acting on light stands as a promising easy to implement means to reduce fatigue throughout the day, improving cognitive defects and allowing a restful night’s sleep with minimal cost and side effects,” says Campbell.

“Our results demonstrate that the human hypothalamus does not respond uniformly to varying levels of light while engaged in a cognitive challenge,” says senior author, Gilles Vandewalle, co-director of the GIGA-CRC Human Imaging , University of Liège.

“Higher levels of light were found to be associated with higher cognitive performance, and our results indicate that this stimulating impact is mediated, in part, by the posterior hypothalamus.

“This region is likely to work jointly with the decreased activity of the anterior and inferior hypothalamus, along with other non-hypothalamus brain structures that regulate wakefulness.”

“Targeted lighting for therapeutic use is an exciting prospect. However, it will require a more comprehensive understanding of how light affects the brain, particularly at the subcortical level. Our findings represent an important step towards this goal, at the level of the hypothalamus,” notes Campbell. 

About this cognition research news

Author: Emily Packer
Source: eLife
Contact: Emily Packer – eLife
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News

Game-Changing Alzheimer’s Research: The Latest on Biomarkers

With your excellent chances of dementia post stroke, has your doctor taken on the responsibility to test for early indications and implement those dementia prevention protocols? Why not?  Biomarkers do nothing useful unless they are followed up by EXACT DEMENTIA PREVENTION PROTOCOLS!

Laziness? Incompetence? Or just don't care? No leadership? No strategy? Not my job? Not my Problem?

Your risk of dementia, has your doctor told you of this?  Your doctor is responsible for preventing this!

1. A documented 33% dementia chance post-stroke from an Australian study?   May 2012.

2. Then this study came out and seems to have a range from 17-66%. December 2013.`    

3. A 20% chance in this research.   July 2013.

4. Dementia Risk Doubled in Patients Following Stroke September 2018 

The latest here:

Game-Changing Alzheimer’s Research: The Latest on Biomarkers

he field of neurodegenerative dementias, particularly Alzheimer’s disease (AD), has been revolutionized by the development of imaging and cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers and is on the brink of a new development: emerging plasma biomarkers. Research now recognizes the relationship between the cognitive-behavioral syndromic diagnosis (ie, the illness) and the etiologic diagnosis (the disease) — and the need to consider each separately when developing a diagnostic formulation. The National Institute on Aging and Alzheimer’s Association Research Framework uses the amyloid, tau, and neurodegeneration system to define AD biologically in living patients. Here is an overview of the framework, which requires biomarker evidence of amyloid plaques (amyloid positivity) and neurofibrillary tangles (tau positivity), with evidence of neurodegeneration (neurodegeneration positivity) to support the diagnosis.

The Diagnostic Approach for Symptomatic Patients

The differential diagnosis in symptomatic patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), mild behavioral impairment, or dementia is broad and includes multiple neurodegenerative diseases (eg, AD, frontotemporal lobar degeneration, dementia with Lewy bodies, argyrophilic grain disease, hippocampal sclerosis); vascular ischemic brain injury (eg, stroke); tumors; infectious, inflammatory, paraneoplastic, or demyelinating diseases; trauma; hydrocephalus, toxic/metabolic insults; and other rare diseases. The patient’s clinical syndrome narrows the differential diagnosis.

Once the clinician has a prioritized differential diagnosis of the brain disease or condition that is probably causing or contributing to the patient’s signs and symptoms, they can then select appropriate assessments and tests, typically starting with a laboratory panel and brain MRI. Strong evidence backed by practice recommendations also supports the use of fluorodeoxyglucose PET as a marker of functional brain abnormalities associated with dementia. Although molecular biomarkers are typically considered at the later stage of the clinical workup, the anticipated future availability of plasma biomarkers will probably change the timing of molecular biomarker assessment in patients with suspected cognitive impairment owing to AD.

Molecular PET Biomarkers

Three PET tracers approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the detection of cerebral amyloid plaques have high sensitivity (89%-98%) and specificity (88%-100%) compared with autopsy, the gold standard diagnostic tool. However, these scans are costly and are not reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid. Because all amyloid PET scans are covered by the Veterans Administration, this test is more readily accessible for patients receiving VA benefits.

The appropriate-use criteria developed by the Amyloid Imaging Task Force recommends amyloid PET for patients with persistent or progressive MCI or dementia. In such patients, a negative amyloid PET scan would strongly weigh against AD, supporting a differential diagnosis of other etiologies. Although a positive amyloid PET scan in patients with MCI or dementia indicates the presence of amyloid plaques, it does not necessarily confirm AD as the cause. Cerebral amyloid plaques may coexist with other pathologies and increase with age, even in cognitively normal individuals.

The IDEAS study looked at the clinical utility of amyloid PET in a real-world dementia specialist setting. In the study, dementia subspecialists documented their presumed etiologic diagnosis (and level of confidence) before and after amyloid PET. Of the 11,409 patients who completed the study, the etiologic diagnosis changed from AD to non-AD in just over 25% of cases and from non-AD to AD in 10.5%. Clinical management changed in about 60% of patients with MCI and 63.5% of patients with dementia.

In May 2020, the FDA approved flortaucipir F-18, the first diagnostic tau radiotracer for use with PET to estimate the density and distribution of aggregated tau neurofibrillary tangles in adults with cognitive impairment undergoing evaluation for AD. Regulatory approval of flortaucipir F-18 was based on findings from two clinical trials of terminally ill patients who were followed to autopsy. The studies included patients with a spectrum of clinically diagnosed dementias and those with normal cognition. The primary outcome of the studies was accurate visual interpretation of the images in detecting advanced AD tau neurofibrillary tangle pathology (Braak stage V or VI tau pathology). Sensitivity of five trained readers ranged from 68% to 86%, and specificity ranged from 63% to 100%; interrater agreement was 0.87. Tau PET is not yet reimbursed and is therefore not yet readily available in the clinical setting. Moreover, appropriate use criteria have not yet been published.

Molecular Fluid Biomarkers

Cerebrospinal (CSF) fluid analysis is currently the most readily available and reimbursed test to aid in diagnosing AD, with appropriate-use criteria for patients with suspected AD. CSF biomarkers for AD are useful in cognitively impaired patients when the etiologic diagnosis is equivocal, there is only an intermediate level of diagnostic confidence, or there is very high confidence in the etiologic diagnosis. Testing for CSF biomarkers is also recommended for patients at very early clinical stages (eg, early MCI) or with atypical clinical presentations.

A decreased concentration of amyloid-beta 42 in CSF is a marker of amyloid neuritic plaques in the brain. An increased concentration of total tau in CSF reflects injury to neurons, and an increased concentration of specific isoforms of hyperphosphorylated tau reflects neurofibrillary tangles. Presently, the ratios of t-tau to amyloid-beta 42, amyloid-beta 42 to amyloid-beta 40, and phosphorylated-tau 181 to amyloid-beta 42 are the best-performing markers of AD neuropathologic changes and are more accurate than assessing individual biomarkers. These CSF biomarkers of AD have been validated against autopsy, and ratio values of CSF amyloid-beta 42 have been further validated against amyloid PET, with overall sensitivity and specificity of approximately 90% and 84%, respectively.

Some of the most exciting recent advances in AD center around the measurement of these proteins and others in plasma. Appropriate-use criteria for plasma biomarkers in the evaluation of patients with cognitive impairment were published in 2022. In addition to their use in clinical trials, these criteria cautiously recommend using these biomarkers in specialized memory clinics in the diagnostic workup of patients with cognitive symptoms, along with confirmatory CSF markers or PET. Additional data are needed before plasma biomarkers of AD are used as standalone diagnostic markers or considered in the primary care setting.

We have made remarkable progress toward more precise molecular diagnosis of brain diseases underlying cognitive impairment and dementia. Ongoing efforts to evaluate the utility of these measures in clinical practice include the need to increase diversity of patients and providers. Ultimately, the tremendous progress in molecular biomarkers for the diseases causing dementia will help the field work toward our common goal of early and accurate diagnosis, better management, and hope for people living with these diseases.

 

 

Without Early Detection, Fighting Dementia Is an Uphill Battle

With your excellent chances of dementia post stroke, has your doctor taken on the responsibility to test for early indications and implement those dementia prevention protocols? Why not?

Laziness? Incompetence? Or just don't care? No leadership? No strategy? Not my job? Not my Problem?

Your risk of dementia, has your doctor told you of this?  Your doctor is responsible for preventing this!

1. A documented 33% dementia chance post-stroke from an Australian study?   May 2012.

2. Then this study came out and seems to have a range from 17-66%. December 2013.`    

3. A 20% chance in this research.   July 2013.

4. Dementia Risk Doubled in Patients Following Stroke September 2018 

The latest here:

 

Without Early Detection, Fighting Dementia Is an Uphill Battle

A brief assessment in primary care can help identify patients most at risk

by Julie Zissimopoulos, PhD June 27, 2023

Zissimopoulos is an expert in health policy and economics, and an aging and cognition economics researcher.

The FDA is expected to grant full approval soon to the Alzheimer's therapy lecanemab (Leqembi). When that happens, physicians and their patients will have to navigate the path to access and reimbursement, and wrestle with concerns over side effects and cost.

But before those questions can be addressed, a baseline challenge awaits: who are the people who can benefit most from treatment, and how can they be identified? Similarly, who are the people most at risk of developing any form of dementia?

Clinical trials show that lecanemab can be highly effective in clearing the brain of amyloids, the plaque-like substance closely associated with Alzheimer's. Physicians must confirm the presence of amyloid beta pathology before starting treatment.

Reducing amyloids in individuals who have advanced symptoms, however, is pointless. The amyloids need to be cleared before they can ravage the brain, which puts greater emphasis on cognitive screening to find individuals most at risk.

Not Enough Cognitive Screenings

Just over one-third of older Americans report being assessed for cognitive issues. Medicare requires that a comprehensive cognitive assessment be included in each enrollee's annual wellness visit, but only a quarter of those who have a wellness appointment report undergoing a formal cognitive screening.

This situation must change if the country hopes to acquire the basic information needed to forestall a tsunami of cognitive afflictions. About 16.6% of the U.S. population over 65 has mild cognitive impairment. An estimated 6.7 million Americans had Alzheimer's disease in 2021, with the number projected to double by 2050 because of the increasing population of U.S. adults ages 65 and older. For individuals, lack of screening can be an existential issue.

Physicians and researchers, including myself, are looking for ways to make cognitive assessments a regular feature in preventive care. One recommendation to Medicare, private insurers, and health policymakers is to adopt a brief cognitive assessment that can be used in primary care to identify individuals who need more thorough diagnostic workups.

How a Brief Assessment Would Work

To be useful, the assessment will need to be valid in diverse populations, available in various languages and in digital and paper-based forms, and be sensitive to early stages of decline. To be palatable to overworked primary care practices, it will need to be truly brief -- no more than 10 minutes -- and have the potential to be integrated into electronic health records.

Attending issues would have to be addressed. Non-physician healthcare professionals would need to be trained. Primary care doctors would need guidance on communicating the results of a brief cognitive assessment to patients and on making referrals. Medicare would need to step up enforcement of its requirement for detecting cognitive impairment at annual wellness visits, and should establish a medical code for brief cognitive assessments to ensure adequate reimbursement.

A Big Payoff May Await

The payoff for such efforts would be a dramatic increase in identifying people at high risk of developing dementia. They could get more timely treatments, begin to change diets and lifestyle habits, and take steps to plan for the future that could make a significant difference in their lives.

Longstanding neglect of detection of cognitive impairment has resulted in a hidden epidemic. As our understanding of the biology of neurodegenerative diseases improves and better treatments emerge, we need to identify the patients who can benefit from those innovations and do so in a timely and equitable manner.

Julie Zissimopoulos, PhD,opens in a new tab or window is co-director of the Aging and Cognition Program at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics.

You're Not Getting Alzheimer's; You Just Know So Much

Is your doctor taking this into account when giving you a cognitive test post stroke?

You're Not Getting Alzheimer's; You Just Know So Much

What happens to our cognitive abilities as we age? Traditionally it is thought that age leads to a steady deterioration of brain function, but important research in Topics in Cognitive Science argues that older brains may take longer to process ever increasing amounts of knowledge, and this has often been misidentified as declining capacity.

Increased Knowledge

The study, led by Dr. Michael Ramscar of the University of Tuebingen, takes a critical look at the measures that are usually thought to show that our cognitive abilities decline across adulthood. Instead of finding evidence of decline, the team discovered that most standard cognitive measures are flawed, confusing increased knowledge for declining capacity.

More Data Takes More Time

Dr. Ramscar's team used computers, programmed to act as though they were humans, to read a certain amount each day, learning new things along the way. When the researchers let a computer 'read' a limited amount, its performance on cognitive tests resembled that of a young adult. However, if the same computer was exposed data which represented a lifetime of experiences its performance looked like that of an older adult. Often it was slower, not because its processing capacity had declined, but because increased “experience” had caused the computer’s database to grow, giving it more data to process, and that processing takes time.

“What does this finding mean for our understanding of our ageing minds, for example older adults’ increased difficulties with word recall? These are traditionally thought to reveal how our memory for words deteriorates with age, but Big Data adds a twist to this idea,” said Dr. Ramscar. “Technology now allows researchers to make quantitative estimates about the number of words an adult can be expected to learn across a lifetime, enabling the team to separate the challenge that increasing knowledge poses to memory from the actual performance of memory itself.”

Rethinking the Aging Mind

“Imagine someone who knows two people’s birthdays and can recall them almost perfectly. Would you really want to say that person has a better memory than a person who knows the birthdays of 2000 people, but can ‘only’ match the right person to the right birthday nine times out of ten?” asks Ramscar.

“It is time we rethink what we mean by the aging mind before our false assumptions result in decisions and policies that marginalize the old or waste precious public resources to remediate problems that do not exist,” said Ramscar.

SOURCE:
Topics in Cognitive Science, Editors Wayne Gray and Thomas Hills.

• Full bibliographic information:Ramscar, M., Hendrix, P., Shaoul, C., Millin, P., and Baayen, H, The myth of cognitive decline: Nonlinear dynamics of lifelong learning, Topics in Cognitive Science, DOI: 10.1111/tops.12078
  URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tops.12078/full
  Editorial Citation: Gray, W. D. and Hill, T, Does cognition deteriorate with age or is it enhanced by experience? Topics in Cognitive Science, DOI:10.1111/tops.12080
  URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tops.12080/abstract

 

 

Rapid stimulation of human dentate gyrus function with acute mild exercise - 10 minutes

So before your doctor tests your cognitive abilities make sure you get in 10 minutes of exercise. Bias those results and confound your doctor. 

Rapid stimulation of human dentate gyrus function with acute mild exercise - 10 minutes

Kazuya Suwabe, Kyeongho Byun, Kazuki Hyodo, Zachariah M. Reagh, Jared M. Roberts, Akira Matsushita, Kousaku Saotome, Genta Ochi, Takemune Fukuie, Kenji Suzuki, Yoshiyuki Sankai, Michael A. Yassa, and Hideaki Soya

PNAS October 9, 2018 115 (41) 10487-10492; published ahead of print September 24, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1805668115

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1. Edited by Bruce McEwen, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY, and approved August 14, 2018 (received for review April 19, 2018)

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Significance

Our previous work has shown that mild physical exercise can promote better memory in rodents. Here, we use functional MRI in healthy young adults to assess the immediate impact of a short bout of mild exercise on the brain mechanisms supporting memory processes. We find that this brief intervention rapidly enhanced highly detailed memory processing and resulted in elevated activity in the hippocampus and the surrounding regions, as well as increased coupling between the hippocampus and cortical regions previously known to support detailed memory processing. These findings represent a mechanism by which mild exercise, on par with yoga and tai chi, may improve memory. Future studies should test the long-term effects of regular mild exercise on age-related memory loss.

Abstract

Physical exercise has beneficial effects on neurocognitive function, including hippocampus-dependent episodic memory. Exercise intensity level can be assessed according to whether it induces a stress response; the most effective exercise for improving hippocampal function remains unclear. Our prior work using a special treadmill running model in animals has shown that stress-free mild exercise increases hippocampal neuronal activity and promotes adult neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus (DG) of the hippocampus, improving spatial memory performance. However, the rapid modification, from mild exercise, on hippocampal memory function and the exact mechanisms for these changes, in particular the impact on pattern separation acting in the DG and CA3 regions, are yet to be elucidated. To this end, we adopted an acute-exercise design in humans, coupled with high-resolution functional MRI techniques, capable of resolving hippocampal subfields. A single 10-min bout of very light-intensity exercise (30%V˙O2peak

) results in rapid enhancement in pattern separation and an increase in functional connectivity between hippocampal DG/CA3 and cortical regions (i.e., parahippocampal, angular, and fusiform gyri). Importantly, the magnitude of the enhanced functional connectivity predicted the extent of memory improvement at an individual subject level. These results suggest that brief, very light exercise rapidly enhances hippocampal memory function, possibly by increasing DG/CA3−neocortical functional connectivity.

A Quick And Easy Way To Boost IQ 10%

You'll want to do this prior to the cognitive tests your doctor will run you through.
https://www.spring.org.uk/2018/04/boost-iq.php?omhide=true

People in the study improved their cognitive functioning by an amount equivalent to 10 IQ points.

Recalling a past success could be enough to raise IQ by 10%, research finds.

People who were asked to ‘self-affirm’ improved their cognitive functioning by an amount equivalent to 10 IQ points.

→ Subscribe to PsyBlog for $4 per month: get an ad-free experience and more articles.

Self-affirmation involves writing (or thinking) about core values, such as relationships with family, creativity or aesthetic preferences, whatever feels most important.

The study was carried out on people living in poverty.

It was designed to see if a simple procedure could help them overcome the powerful stigma and low self-worth they were experiencing.

Professor Jiaying Zhao, who led the study, said:

“This study shows that surprisingly simple acts of self-affirmation improve the cognitive function and behavioral outcomes of people in poverty.”

Previous research has shown that living in poverty consumes a large amount of mental energy.

This can reduce the amount of mental ‘bandwidth’ available for other parts of life.

For the study, almost 150 people in a New Jersey soup kitchen were asked to record a personal story of a past success.

They were compared to a control group.

The self-affirmation helped people do better on cognitive tests and they were subsequently more likely to seek information on aid from local government services.

Other studies have shown that self-affirmation can help increase the test scores of marginalised groups, such as African-American students and female maths students.

→ Explore PsyBlog’s ebooks, all written by Dr Jeremy Dean:

• NEW: Accept Yourself: Self-Acceptance Practices For Emotional Healing
• Activate: How To Find Joy Again By Changing What You Do
• The Anxiety Plan: 42 Strategies For Worry, Phobias, OCD and Panic
• Spark: 17 Steps That Will Boost Your Motivation For Anything

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Hall et al., 2014).

Looking At This Colour Makes You 31% Smarter

You don't want to look at this color prior to your cognitive testing. That might bias the results. 

Looking At This Colour Makes You 31% Smarter

The colours that can make you smarter and more creative.

Seeing red makes people 31% better at detail-oriented tasks like recalling memories or proofreading, research finds.

The colour blue, though, makes people more creative — doubling the number of creative ideas they produce.

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Professor Juliet Zhu, study co-author, said:

“Previous research linked blue and red to enhanced cognitive performance, but disagreed on which provides the greatest boost.

It really depends on the nature of the task.”

The research involved over 600 people doing six different tasks, some involving detail, others creativity.

The tasks were done on computers which displayed either a red or blue background to the task.

People did better on the detail-oriented tasks when the background was red.

Professor Zhu explained that this was because of the unconscious signals the colour sends:

“Thanks to stop signs, emergency vehicles and teachers’ red pens, we associate red with danger, mistakes and caution.

The avoidance motivation, or heightened state, that red activates makes us vigilant and thus helps us perform tasks where careful attention is required to produce a right or wrong answer.”

Blue encouraged people to be more creative.

With a blue background, people produced twice as many creative ideas.

Dr Ravi Mehta, the study’s first author, said it was because it made people feel calm:

“Through associations with the sky, the ocean and water, most people associate blue with openness, peace and tranquility.

The benign cues make people feel safe about being creative and exploratory.

Not surprisingly it is people’s favourite colour.”

The studies were aimed at seeing how colours could be used in marketing to sell more products.

Red helped sell a toothpaste, the researchers found, when negative aspects, like cavity prevention, were emphasised.

For more positive, aspirational messages, like tooth whitening, the colour blue helped sell the toothpaste.