Alzheimer’s is usually a relentless, miserable drive toward death. But could we train healthy parts of the brain to step up and take over for regions afflicted by Alzheimer’s, and so delay onset of symptoms? A new study from the University of Montreal suggests that using the brain’s “plasticity” in that way is possible, opening the door to possible new treatments.
A team from the university’s geriatric institute did MRI brain scans on 15 healthy elderly people and 15 with mild cognitive impairment, often the first step toward Alzheimer’s. They later repeated the imaging after the cognitively impaired subjects had undergone mental exercises designed to recruit parts of the brain normally involved in other processes into the memory task.
Before the memory training, MRIs showed activity in areas traditionally linked to memory in all subjects, with less activity in the cognitively impaired people. After the training for the impaired group, brain regions usually involved in different tasks, like language processing and skill learning, showed memory activity on the scans.
What’s more, the impaired subjects’ memory test scores improved by 33%. Said Dr. Sylvie Belleville, a neuropsychologist and lead author of the study published in Brain: A journal of neurology:
The healthy area of the brain has taken over for the area that is compromised.
Brain plasticity refers to the brain’s remarkable ability to change and reorganize itself. It was long thought that brain plasticity declined with age, however, our study demonstrates that this is not the case, even in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease