Intellectual activity and dementia: More help than cure

Author: Robby Berman / Source: Big Think

A remarkable seven-decade cognition studied 498 people from Scotland.
People who test well as children retain that ranking through life.
Study finds remaining engaged has no effect on the trajectory of dementia’s “cognitive burden”.

All of them were born in Scotland in 1936.

And according to the Scottish Council for Research in Education archives, all of them took the same intelligence test on June 4, 1947 when they were 11 or 12, depending on where their birthdays fell on the calendar. (The tests were part of a nationwide survey.) A little more than half a century later, researchers from the University of Aberdeen decided to take advantage of this remarkable data set and recruited 498 of the then-64-year-olds to study the effect of intellectual engagement on one’s mental condition during later years. Their study, published online in BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal), came to two conclusions:

Remaining intellectually active does not effect the likelihood of dementia or slow its physiological progression, contrary to findings of some other studies.
The brain nonetheless benefits from being exercised. Should dementia eventually occur, mentally active people have more of a “cognitive reserve,” and thus it takes longer for their dementia’s symptoms to become noticeable.

As the study’s authors write in The Conversation, “‘Use it or lose it’ is the received wisdom when it comes to cognitive ability. But is there any truth in this old saw? Our latest study suggests that it depends how much ‘it’ you have to start with.”