The future of cognitive enhancement technologies holds great promise, but responsible use remains paramount to harnessing their full potential safely...
Juliana F. W. Cohen, ScM, ScD
Department of Health Sciences
Merrimack College
North Andover MA 01845.
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Sugar consumption among Americans is above recommended limits and this excess intake may have important health implications.
This study examined the associations of pregnancy and offspring sugar consumption, as well as sugar-sweetened beverages, other beverages (diet soda, juice), and fruit consumption with child cognition.
This study found that when pregnant women or their children consumed greater quantities of sugar, as well as when women consumed diet soda during pregnancy, this was associated with poorer childhood cognition. However, children’s fruit consumption was associated with higher cognitive scores.
(more…)MedicalResearch.com Interview with: [caption id="attachment_38553" align="alignleft" width="128"] Dr. Bernstein[/caption] Lori J Bernstein, PhD, CPsych Neuropsychologist, Dept. of Supportive Care Core Member, Cancer Rehabilitation &...
Tobias Gerstenberg, PhD
MIT
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: The question of how causation is best understood has been troubling philosophers for a long time. As psychologists, we are particularly interested in understanding how people make causal judgments.
In our experiments, we showed participants video clips of colliding billiard balls. Participants were asked to say whether one ball (ball A) caused another (ball B) to go through a gate, or prevented it from going through. We used eye-tracking technology to record participants' eye-movements as they were watching the clips.
The results showed that participants spontaneously engaged in counterfactual simulation when asked to make causal judgments. They not only looked at what actually happened, but also tried to anticipate where ball B would have gone if ball A hadn't been present. The more certain participants were that ball B would have missed the goal if ball A hadn't been there, the more they agreed that ball A caused ball B to go through the gate.
In a control condition we asked participants about what actually happened. In this condition, participants were much less likely to simulate where ball B would have gone. Together, these findings demonstrate a very close link between counterfactual simulation and causal judgment.
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MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Chris Thompson BSc MSc ANutr AFHEA
University of Exeter
St. Luke's Campus
Exeter Devon
Medical Research: What is the background for this study?
Response: Dietary nitrate has been shown to favourably alter the contractility of type II muscle fibres and enhance blood flow to working muscles that are predominantly type II. Dietary nitrate may also improve perfusion to areas of the brain responsible for cognitive function. It is therefore possible that through these mechanisms, nitrate-rich beetroot juice supplementation may improve both physical and cognitive performance during exercise which reflects the high intensity intermittent nature of team sport play.
Medical Research: What are the main findings?
Response: Participants were able to complete greater total work during an intermittent sprint test following nitrate-rich beetroot juice supplementation. We also found that dietary nitrate enabled a reduction in response time to decision making during the cognitive tasks performed throughout the exercise test.
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MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Vera Novak, MD PhD
Associate Professor of Neurology
Dept. of Neurology, Stroke Division
Director Syncope and Falls in the Elderly Laboratory
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Boston, MA
MedicalResearch: What is the background for this study?
Dr. Novak: Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a major contributor to morbidity and mortality.
Type 2 diabetes mellitus affects more than 44 million people in the U.S., and its numbers are growing rapidly, affecting up to 27% of older adults. Diabetes mellitus accelerates brain aging by about 5 years1, manifests as a widespread generalized atrophy2, and promotes earlier onset of vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease (AD).3,4 Diabetes mellitus -related atrophy manifests as worse cognitive function, memory, and gait, especially during a dual task, 5,6 and even a tight glycemic control did not improve cognitive function in participants of the large clinical trials 7.
MedicalResearch: What are the main findings?
Dr. Novak: Sixty-five participants (aged 66± 9.2 years) 35 with T2DM and 30 non-diabetic controls participated in this study. After 2 years of follow-up, participants with T2 Diabetes mellitus had diminished vascular reactivity in the brain (an ability to increase blood flow in responses to a task or metabolic demands) and performed worse on multiple cognitive tasks (in particular verbal learning and memory). In T2DM group, lower cerebral vasoreactivity correlated with worse performance on daily living activities. Specifically, the lower vasodilatation (ability to increase blood flow) was associated with worse mental functions. In addition, those with higher markers of inflammation had greater decline in vascular function in the brain.
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MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr.Carey Gleason Ph.D
School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin
Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Center
William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital
Wisconsin Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, Madison, Wisconsin
Dr. Gleason: In this response I refer to hormone therapy (HT), which was formally called hormone "replacement" therapy. In particular, we examined menopausal HT, i.e., the use of HT during the menopausal transition to address menopausal symptoms.
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Gleason: The WHI Memory Study (WHIMS) suggested that HT was associated with cognitive harm for women age 65 and older. In contrast, we found that the cognitive performance of women randomized to receive menopausal hormone therapy did not differ from that of women randomized to receive the placebo. On a measure of mood states, women treated with conjugated equine estrogens showed improvements compared to those on placebo.
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MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Michael K. Scullin, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator of the Sleep Neuroscience & Cognition (SNaC) Laboratory and an Assistant Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience Director Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory Baylor University
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Scullin: One of the purposes of sleep in healthy adults is to optimize cognitive functioning. When we lose out on a few hours of sleep we tend not to be able to focus or think as well as when we get enough sleep (typically 8 hours). Even more interesting is that particular aspects of sleep physiology—our deepest levels of sleep known as slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep—are essential to our brain’s ability to take the information that we learn during the day and stabilize those memories so that we can use them in the future.
Sleep quantity and quality change markedly across the lifespan, though there are individual differences in how much one’s sleep changes. Our work was concerned with the possible long-term repercussions of cutting back on sleep and getting lower quality sleep (less slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep). We reviewed approximately 200 scientific articles on this topic and we found that the amount of total sleep and the quality of that sleep is important to cognitive and memory functioning in young adults and middle-aged adults and can even predict how well someone’s cognitive functioning will be decades later. Thus, if you’re sleeping well when you are 40 then you are investing in preserving your mental functioning at age 50.
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MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Jose Gutierrez MD, MPH
Assistant Professor of Neurology
Division of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Disease
Columbia University Medical Center NY, NY
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Gutierrez: There is growing interest in the effects of vascular health in cognition. The prevailing thought is that vascular disease leads to worse cognition due to direct structural damage of the brain, as in the case of brain infarcts, microhemorrhages or white matter hyperintensities, which are themselves associated with traditional cardiovascular risk factors such as hypertension, diabetes, smoking etc. Arterial stiffness, particularly of the aorta, has gained interest among researchers as predictors of vascular disease and worse cognition, but it is not clear whether arterial stiffness in the absence of traditional definition of vascular disease may be associated with worse cognition.
We investigated in a representative sample of the US among adults 60 years or older who underwent cognitive testing with the Digit Symbol Subtraction test and who also had other measures of vascular disease, including blood workup, blood pressure measurement and Pulse pressure. We hypothesized that indirect measures of arterial stiffness such as ABI > 1.3 or pulse pressure would be associated with worse cognition, even among those without any clinical vascular disease or traditional vascular risk factors. We Included 2573 US adults in the sample, segregated those with any self-reported vascular disease or vascular risk factors and we found that among those without vascular disease or risk factors, an ABI > 1.3 and increased intra-visit blood pressure variability were predictors of worse cognitive performance compared with those without these indicators. Among participants with both indirect markers of arterial stiffness, their cognitive performance was worse that having only one of them suggesting additive effects of these two variables.
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MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr Christos Pliatsikas PhD
Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology School of Psychology
University of Kent Canterbury Kent
Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: It has been proposed that lifelong bilingualism preserves the white matter structure of older bilinguals because of the increased cognitive demands that come with handling two languages for their entire life. We wanted to extend this by investigating whether active (or "immersive") bilingualism in younger late bilinguals would give similar results.
We showed increased white matter integrity (or myelination) in several white matter tracts that have also been shown to be better preserved in older lifelong bilinguals, compared to monolinguals. Based on our findings, we propose that any benefit of bilingualism to the brain structure is simply an effect of actively handling two languages without presupposing lifelong usage- our participants were only about 30 years old and had been active bilinguals for only about 7-8 years. In other words, immersive bilingualism, even in late bilinguals, leads to structural changes that can bring about benefits in older age, by assisting in the preservation of the white matter structure in the brain.
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Medical Research.com Interview with
Dr. Anna Nordström MD
Department of Community Medicine and Rehabilitation, Rehabilitation Medicine, Umeå University, SE-901 87 Umeå, Sweden
Medical Research.com: What are the main findings of the study?
Dr. Nordström: We have found that low cognitive function and factors related to low socioeconomic status and intoxications are strong independent risk factors for mild traumatic brain injury in men.
Medical Research.com: Were any of the findings unexpected?
Dr. Nordström: Our knowledge of risk factors that predispose people to sustaining such injury is limited. Previous research has inferred that mild traumatic brain injuries have important long-term consequences on cognitive function. However, we found similar deficits in cognitive function in subjects that sustained a mild traumatic brain injury before and after cognitive testing. Thus our data suggest that the injury itself may not reduce cognitive function.
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