Exercise the brain and forget dementia

Exercise the brain and forget dementia
[23 August 2006 - The Age (Australia) IT IS never too late to start exercising the brain. Tackle the crossword puzzles, learn a new language or take up dancing. Still better, do all three. That's the message of Michael Valenzuela, who was yesterday named a 2006 Eureka Prize winner for his research into how maintaining an active mind can ward off the onset of dementia. In one study, Dr Valenzuela, a clinical neuroscience research fellow at the University of NSW school of psychiatry, looked at almost 29,000 people. He found that a lifetime of complex mental activity almost halved the risk of dementia. More