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Interview with Dr. Charles Hall, Ph.D.
Dr. Charles B. Hall, Ph.D., is Professor of Epidemiology & Population Health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. His new, compelling research connects mental activity and memory decline.
Transcript of Video Interview:
What is Dementia?
Dementia is a very heterogeneous disease. In fact it is not really a disease. It is really a syndrome resulting from a number of causes including Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia.
Central Findings of the Study
The key findings of the study are that persons who developed Alzheimer's disease and engaged in cognitively stimulating leisure activities such as reading, writing or crossword puzzles, had their memory decline delayed as compared to those who didn't. The more activity, the longer the delay.
Significance of Findings
The research was done at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine
This study was signficant in that everybody who was in the study started out initally healthy and without any evidence of dementia. Other studies have looked at a particular PART of the natural history of the dementia process. This is really the first study that put all the pieces together. Because people were initially healthy at the beginning of the study, this really rules out the possibility that the early results might have been caused by some sort of misclassification.
This was not just an artifact of some sort of selection of a particular time. We followed everybody throughout the entire natural history of the dementia process. So people who started out healthy ended up with dementia. If they participated in cognitive activity, they had their memory decline delayed.
Next Steps
We want to look and see exactly the KINDS of cognitive activity that are most beneficial to the people in this study. We also have another observational study we are looking at. The follow-up to that would be to do a clinical intervention study to see if this can be shown to be an eficacious clinical intervention for elderly people.
Public Health Implications
If we can delay the average time at which people lose independence by a year in this growing elderly population, that would have HUGE implications for public health and the cost of healthcare resources in this country and all over the world.
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J. Verghese, C. Hall, "Cognitive activities delay onset of memory decline in persons who develop dementia," Neurology, August 2009
In addition to Drs. Hall and Verghese,other Einstein researchers involved in the study were R. B. Lipton, M.D., M. Sliwinski, Ph.D., M. J. Katz, M.P.H., and C. A. Derby, Ph.D.
