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Scientists find specific games that may boost brain health, improve Alzheimer’s disease and dementia risk.
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People who did one type of exercise experienced a 25% decreased risk.
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Here’s what experts want you to know about the findings.
Eating the best foods for brain health, exercising, and staying social are key for keeping your mind sharp with age. Now, scientists say there’s another activity to add to your routine that may lower your risk of Alazhiemer’s disease and dementia. A new large-scale clinical trial revealed that a particular type of brain exercise, known as speed of processing training, resulted in a 25% lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or related dementias compared to other types of brain exercises and a control group.
Meet the Experts: Joel Salinas, M.D., neurologist, co-founder, and chief medical officer at Isaac Health; and Barbara Sparacino, M.D., F.A.P.A., a geriatric psychiatrist.
Specifically, the study found that people who completed speed of processing training and at least one booster session—a reinforcement training months after the initial ones—developed the biggest advantages against dementia.
The study, published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, followed over 2,000 adults aged 65 and older from six metropolitan areas over the span of 20 years. Participants were each randomly assigned a different type of brain training—speed of processing, memory training, reasoning training, or none at all—and over the course of five to six weeks, the trainees attended up to 10 sessions that lasted 60 to 70 minutes. Months later, some received what researchers called “booster sessions” or bonus training as reinforcement. After training was complete, researchers tracked participants’ cognitive health via Medicare records and documented who eventually developed dementia. Out of the brain games studied, only the speed of processing training (with booster sessions) was linked to a significantly lower risk of developing the disease.
What games boost brain health the most?
“Speed of processing training is a cognitive program designed to improve how quickly and accurately a person can process visual information and respond to it,” explains Joel Salinas, M.D., neurologist, co-founder, and chief medical officer at Isaac Health. “Participants practice identifying and locating visual targets under increasing time pressure, often while dividing attention between different stimuli. It can feel a bit like playing a fast-paced shooting game with distractions.” Barbara Sparacino, M.D., F.A.P.A., a geriatric psychiatrist, adds that you can think of it like exercise for your “your brain’s reaction time and focus muscles.”
Contrarily, memory training teaches strategies to remember words or information, like mnemonic devices such as acronyms (think: ROYGBIV for colors of the rainbow), Dr. Sparacino explains, and reasoning training “focuses on pattern recognition and logical sequences,” by challenging the mind to figure out “what comes next,” she concludes.
In the study, memory training and reasoning training did not reduce dementia diagnoses over time. “That’s important,” says Dr. Sparacino. Because it means not all brain exercises are created equal, she says.
The bottom line
“For years, we’ve known that brain training can improve performance on specific tasks in the short-term. What we haven’t known is whether it meaningfully changes long-term dementia risk,” says Dr. Sparacino.
Dr. Salina adds: “This study provides some of the first evidence that a specific form of cognitive training may be associated with a reduced likelihood of diagnosed dementia decades later. Previous research showed that cognitive training can improve performance on certain mental tasks, but this study goes further by linking training to actual medical diagnoses recorded in health claims data.”
However, it’s worth noting that the results do not prove that the training biologically prevents dementia; rather, they suggest that it may delay the onset of clinical symptoms or diagnosis. “The public should understand that targeted training appears more promising than general brain games, and that cognitive training is likely most effective when combined with broader healthy lifestyle habits,” Dr. Salina adds. Those include regular physical activity, maintaining cardiovascular health (managing blood pressure and cholesterol), engaging in lifelong learning, staying socially active, and getting adequate sleep, he concludes.
“I often tell patients: Brain health is like a retirement account,” says Dr. Sparacino. “It grows from steady, consistent deposits over time.”
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