Psience Quest

Mindfulness meditation mends mild cognitive impairment

Jonathan D Grinstein

Quote:A standard therapy does not exist to prevent or delay the progression from mild cognitive impairment—a decline in brain abilities like memory, thinking, language, and judgment—to Alzheimer’s disease. This type of medical intervention would have a huge impact on patients and their loved ones as well as the economic burden of Alzheimer’s disease.

Now, a study has shown that mindfulness meditation can have positive effects on cognitive impairment in adults. In the study, adults with mild cognitive impairment could learn mindfulness meditation, and those that did had improved mild cognitive impairment. This research shows that the brain function of patients with mild cognitive impairment can be enhanced through non-drug-based approaches like mindfulness meditation.

Exercising away dementia demons 

While medications have been unsuccessful, non-drug-based interventions, like exercise, have shown promise in improving brain function. Fittingly, exercise has shown to increase the volume of a key brain structure involved in memory processing that degenerates with Alzheimer’s disease called the hippocampus, which is a sign of improved brain health.

How these changes occur is not well-understood, but there are clues that the stress-reducing component of exercise may play a role. Chronic stress negatively impacts the hippocampus, and high levels of chronic stress are linked to an increased prevalence of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease.

Thanks. This reminded me of the old finding that London taxi-drivers tended to have a larger hippocampus as a result of having to learn the geography of the city in detail. I Googled it, to find that it does seem to have been quite rigorously confirmed:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...xi-memory/

What I hadn't heard before was that it's conjectured that - while taxi-drivers develop a larger rear hippocampus - they suffer a compensating "front-end shrinkage," which makes them perform worse on a test that involves memorising "what looks like a dollhouse designed by a loony architect, full of superfluous lines and squiggles ..."(the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Test)