Researchers at Washington University in St Louis say specially designed training could help overcome some of memory failings associated with old age. They found that when older people were given a strategy to aid memory processing, they had increased activity in the parts of the brain associated with learning. The study, published online by the journal Neuron, involved 62 people. The younger participants were in their 20s, and the older adults who were healthy and free of any signs of dementia were in their 70s and 80s. Researchers used a powerful imaging technique to measure activity in the frontal cortex - the region of the brain responsible for higher-level intellectual processing - as the participants tried to memorize a series of words. The scan confirmed that older people had reduced activity in the frontal cortex compared to the younger participants when they were simply shown the words and asked to try to remember them. However, the team found that this situation could be changed with a strategy to aid memory processing. Lead researcher Dr Randy Buckner says, "In the second experiment we presented words one at a time and asked the subjects to make a decision about what category the word fell in - for example, whether it was abstract or concrete. "And when we did that, the older adults showed increased activity in these frontal regions, and their memory performance improved." Dr Buckner says the findings show the situation with regard to overcoming memory deficits in ageing is much more promising than previously thought. "It could have been the case that the frontal regions in the older adults had atrophied or undergone cellular deterioration to the extent that they were inaccessible to these individuals," he says. "But that was not the case. These regions were potentially available to participate in solving these tasks, but the older adults were under-recruiting them." The team will now turn their attention to identifying what kind of training would be most effective for maintaining memory functioning.
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