The improvement in the quality of life in the older generation through Brain Training using Cognitive Skills.

A trial was carried out at King’s College London with nearly 7000 participants. It involved splitting the participants randomly into 3 groups that undertook different tasks.

1^st group: Reasoning and problem solving tasks.

2^nd group: Practicing cognitive skills like memory & attention training tasks.

3^rd group: Looking for information on the internet tasks.

The results were measured by participants answering questions from the

 “instrumental activities of daily living scale”.  

Devised by M.P. Lawton & E.M. Brody

This has questions such as:

When shopping how do you rate your capability?

1.     Take care of all shopping needs independently
2.     Shop independently for small purchases
3.     Need to be accompanied on any shopping trip.
4.     Completely unable to shop.

Each participant rated themselves on everyday tasks in the trial.

A team led by Clive Ballard at the University noticed after just 6 months of 5 sessions per week, the Cognitive Skills group showed improvement over the other two groups. These improvements really started to become apparent after only 3 months.

The benefits involved improved participant's short-term memory, judgements of grammatical accuracy and the ability to learn new words.

Because of the large number of people involved, this was a gold standard piece of research. Not only that, because of the sizable group of participants it had a reasonable chance of truly detecting any effects of the treatment if it was really there.

This proved that its possible that Cognitive training exercises can bring benefits to people amongst the older population with their everyday tasks and activities inducing an improved quality of life and independence.

Source: JAMDA

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