NIH Seeks Strategies to Preserve Brain Health: Suggests Promising Areas for Intervention
[21 February 2006 - National Institutes of Health (NIH)] With the rapid aging of the population, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is intensifying the search for strategies to preserve brain health as people grow older. The effort moved an important step forward today with a report by an expert panel to the NIH, suggesting a number of promising avenues for maintaining or enhancing cognitive and emotional function. Specifically, the group said, education, cardiovascular health, physical activity, psychosocial factors and genetics appear to be associated with brain health with age, and research aimed at directly testing the effectiveness of interventions in several of these areas deserves further attention. The report is published online today in Alzheimer�s and Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer�s Association. It is a product of the Critical Evaluation Study Committee, a panel of experts appointed by NIH and led by Hugh Hendrie, M.B., Ch.B., D.Sc., of Indiana University, Indianapolis. The committee evaluated several large on-going studies of older adults for current scientific knowledge on brain health. ... Another major theme emphasized the interconnectedness between cognitive and emotional health. Cognitive health and emotional well-being are �inextricably linked,� the report concludes, and efforts should be made to examine them simultaneously. �Cognitive decline and emotional stress in older people involve a number of physiological and psychological processes going on at the same time,� says Thomas Insel, M.D., Director of NIMH. �This report highlights the need to better understand this interrelatedness if we are going to devise effective ways to maintain brain health.� The evaluation committee reviewed scientific data from 36 large, ongoing studies of aging and identified more than 40 separate factors that may play a role in cognitive and emotional health. Those highlighted in the report are summarized below, including those in which possible interventions might be explored:
Education � Higher levels of education correlate with both good cognitive and emotional function in the scientific literature. But there is no consensus as to why this may be so. Researchers continue to explore such explanations as education providing cognitive �reserve� or the socioeconomic factors such as quality of education that may affect the relationship between higher education and better cognition.
Psychosocial � A number of psychosocial factors � emotional and social support networks, high socio-economic status and low stress levels � correlate with cognitive and emotional health later in life. Stress, for example, has been linked to cognitive decline, while social engagement, social support and higher socio-economic status are associated with better cognitive and emotional health.
Depression and anxiety � Some studies associate a history of depression or anxiety with poor cognitive and emotional health later in life. Researchers only recently have recognized a possible connection between mood disorders and future cognitive decline. This could be an important area for testing interventions. ...