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Ottawa – According to a recent Canadian study, painting is the best way to keep words and details in the memory rather than writing, in the elderly and people with dementia.
The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Waterloo in Canada and published their findings in the latest issue of the scientific journal Experimental Aging and Age.
The researchers said the process of retaining new information generally declined with age, due to the deterioration of key brain structures in memory, such as the hippocampus and frontal lobes. In contrast, the areas of spatial processing of the brain, involved in the representation of images, normal aging and dementia.
To explore the effectiveness of memory memorization, researchers compared different types of memorization techniques to help retain a set of words in a group of undergraduates and a group of older people.
Participants either encoded each word by writing it, pulling it, or telling the physical characteristics of each element.
Young people and older people were getting better results in the process of retrieving information and words when they were using the drawing instead of the writing.
After each task, the researchers performed a memory assessment to monitor their retention of information in both groups.
The results showed that young people and the elderly achieved better results by retrieving information and words when they used drawing instead of writing to encode new information in memory, a particularly important effect in the elderly.
"We found that painting was the best way to allow older people to remember words and details, especially in patients with dementia, because it was kept in areas of visual brain processing that still worked with age, "said Dr. Melissa Med,.
"We have already encouraged these findings to look for ways to help people with dementia, who are experiencing a rapid decline in memory and language functions, as well as cognitive impairment," she said.
Dementia is a very serious disease of the brain affected by aging, a group of diseases that cause cerebral hemorrhage, one of whose forms is Alzheimer's disease and which causes a deterioration of brain function and a loss of memory. The loss of ability to do the daily work and the communication progressively evolve and the situation can deteriorate to the point of becoming defective.
According to the World Health Organization, the number of people with dementia in 2015 is 47.5 million and could increase rapidly with the increase in the average age and number of older people .
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