HHS HealthBeat (March 21, 2012)

Active brains

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Beta-amyloid protein builds up in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients and experts consider it a likely marker of the disease.

But researchers at the University of California, Berkeley also have noticed something else. Susan Landau and William Jagust looked at brain images of older people with normal thinking ability, and at their reports of activities such as how much reading and writing they did at different ages.

“People who engaged in more cognitively stimulating activity had less amyloid in their brain.”  (6 seconds)

Landau says the effect showed up with lifetimes of stimulating activity, and not just with late-in-life activity. It’s too soon to know if cognitive activity helps protect people against Alzheimer’s.

The study in Archives of Neurology was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Learn more at hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: March 21, 2012