Brain exercises could help keep the Mind sharp

From the NY Times oped piece "Exercise Your Aging Brain":

If you’re worried that your mental powers will decline as you age, a new study offers hope that a relatively brief flurry of brain exercises can slow the mind’s deterioration.

The study, whose findings were published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, involved 2,800 men and women in six American cities. All were healthy, 65 and older, and living independently. Most participants were given 10 sessions of training to improve a particular mental skill. A memory group learned strategies for remembering word lists and textual material. A reasoning group learned how to find the pattern in a letter or word series. And a third group was trained to identify an object on a computer screen at increasingly brief exposures.

When tested five years later, these participants had less of a decline in the skill they were trained in than did a control group that received no cognitive training. The payoff from mental exercise seemed far greater than we are accustomed to getting for physical exercise — as if 10 workouts at the gym were enough to keep you fit five years later.
Researchers have yet to find compelling evidence that the retention of mental skills significantly improved the ability to tackle everyday tasks, like handling money or following instructions on a medicine bottle. But there are encouraging hints in the data that brain exercises may well help, a critical factor in determining whether elderly Americans can live independently.

If further studies show that mental exercises can improve everyday functioning, doctors may need to prescribe such training, senior centers may want to set up “brain gyms,” and aging Americans would be wise to do brain-stretching activities. For this purpose, even the Medicare prescription drug program, which critics deem too confusing for many older people to navigate, could prove an unexpected blessing. Spend 10 hours mastering its intricacies today and you could be a lot sharper than your compatriots five years from now.

Here's a related NY Times article "As Minds Age, What’s Next? Brain Calisthenics" that goes in-depth and takes a more critical view of the studies that show some improvment in cognition in elders who do brain exercises (e.g., the seniors can play the games better after playing sessions of them, but they cannot transfer the increased cognitive skills to everyday tasks.)

It also mentions the growing brain exercise industry, replete with Nintendo's "Brain Age" video game, websites HappyNeuron.com and MyBrainTrainer.com, two insurance companies pushing brain health using software, training camps and education -- MetLife and Humana, organizations like the Alzheimer's Association and AARP conducting workshops and providing tips, and living centers like Epoch Senior Living in Providence, RI and Emeritus Assisted Living providing brain fitness exercises to their residents.

Science is not sure yet, but across the country, brain health programs are springing up, offering the possibility of a cognitive fountain of youth.

From “brain gyms” on the Internet to “brain-healthy” foods and activities at assisted living centers, the programs are aimed at baby boomers anxious about entering their golden years and at their parents trying to stave off memory loss or dementia.

“This is going to be one of the hottest topics in the next five years — it’s going to be huge,” said Nancy Ceridwyn, co-director of special projects for the American Society on Aging. “The challenge we have is it’s going to be a lot like the anti-aging industry: how much science is there behind this?”

Med school notes in Libya is like med school notes in Texas

Seriously, I was looking at some of these notes made as PowerPoint slides and saved as pdf files at a Libyan school, and felt that this could be notes that I download from my school's blackboard system.

It's amazing how universal medical knowledge has become, and how English is the lengua franca of medicine, and also how uniform medical education is around the world.

Medicaid tries to work with incentives

Ignoring doctors’ orders may now start exacting a new price among West Virginia’s Medicaid recipients. Under a reorganized schedule of aid, the state, hoping for savings over time, plans to reward “responsible” patients with significant extra benefits or — as critics describe it — punish those who do not join weight-loss or antismoking programs, or who miss too many appointments, by denying important services.

The incentive effort, the first of its kind, received quick approval last summer from the Bush administration, which is encouraging states to experiment with “personal responsibility” as a chief principle of their Medicaid programs. Idaho and Kentucky are also planning reward programs, though more modest ones, for healthful behavior.

In a pilot phase starting in three rural counties over the next few months, many West Virginia Medicaid patients will be asked to sign a pledge “to do my best to stay healthy,” to attend “health improvement programs as directed,” to have routine checkups and screenings, to keep appointments, to take medicine as prescribed and to go to emergency rooms only for real emergencies.

This is from the article "Medicaid Plan Prods Patients Toward Health" in the December 1st issue of the NY Times.