With the rapid aging of the population, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is intensifying the search for strategies to preserve brain health as people grow older. The effort moved an important step forward today with a report by an expert panel to the NIH, suggesting a number of promising avenues for maintaining or enhancing cognitive and emotional function. Specifically, the group said, education, cardiovascular health, physical activity, psychosocial factors and genetics appear to be associated with brain health with age, and research aimed at directly testing the effectiveness of interventions in several of these areas deserves further attention.

The report is published online today in Alzheimer's and Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association. It is a product of the Critical Evaluation Study Committee, a panel of experts appointed by NIH and led by Hugh Hendrie, M.B., Ch.B., D.Sc., of Indiana University, Indianapolis. The committee evaluated several large on-going studies of older adults for current scientific knowledge on brain health.

"Three NIH institutes -- the National Institute on Aging (NIA), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) -- established the NIH Cognitive and Emotional Health Project to coordinate and accelerate research leading to interventions for neurological health," says NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D. "This report suggests a future direction of research and is a terrific example of what we can learn when scientists of diverse specialties work together on a complex health issue."
Hendrie and colleagues cited demographic pressures to find ways to maintain cognitive and emotional health with age. Approximately 4.5 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease, and additional numbers of older people experience less severe, but still problematic cognitive impairment with the risk of such cognitive decline increasing with age. In one area of emotional health -- depression -- the everyday function of an estimated two million older adults is also threatened, according to NIMH.

"With more Americans living well into their 70s, 80s and 90s, developing strategies to preserve cognitive and emotional health as we grow older is a major public health goal," says Richard J. Hodes, M.D., director of the National Institute on Aging. "This report analyzes research identifying factors that are associated with cognitive and emotional health and most importantly describes several directions for testing interventions to determine their effectiveness in improving cognition and emotional health."

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