[ad_1]
LONDON: According to a study published on April 8, electrical stimulation of the brain using a non-invasive hood can help improve the mental scores of older people, those aged 20 to 30 years younger.
The research, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, found that the decline in age-related working memory could be reversed by stimulating two key brain areas at a specific rate.
The results are early and only relate to healthy volunteers at this stage, but may indicate new ways to stimulate brain function in people with age-related cognitive decline, such as patients with dementia and patients with dementia. d & # 39; Alzheimer's.
Using a technique known as electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor cerebral activity and another technique called transcranial ac stimulation (tACS), scientists stimulated the brains of a group young and old people and have been able to modulate brainwave interactions related to their working memory.
The study looked at 42 young adults aged 20 to 29 and 42 adults aged 60 to 76, all of whom were badessed for their performance in a working memory task.
Working memory refers to information temporarily stored for use in immediate tasks such as reasoning and decision-making.
Without brain stimulation, the elderly were slower and less precise than the younger ones.
This is because the younger ones had higher levels of interaction and timing of certain brain wave rhythms, the researchers said, suggesting that targeting these types of rhythms in people's brains older people could improve their functioning.
While receiving active brain stimulation, older people improved their scores on the working memory test at the younger age levels. The effect lasted at least 50 minutes after the stimulation, said Robert Reinhart, a researcher at Boston University in the United States, who led the study.
"By using this kind of stimulation (we have found), we can reconnect or resynchronize these circuits," he told reporters at a telephone news brief.
Reinhart said that discoveries open up new avenues of research, but that they have no immediate impact on medical use: "First, much more basic research is needed."
Neuroscientists agreed that the results raised interesting questions about the functioning of working memory and its decline with age, but that more research would be needed before it could be developed for clinical use . – Reuters
[ad_2]
Source link
