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 Researchers who developed the "game show"-like app and tested its
effects on cognition and motivation in a small trial found that
patients who played the game over a period of a month had around a
40 percent improvement in their memory scores.
"We hope to extend these findings in future studies of healthy
ageing and mild Alzheimer's disease," said George Savulich, who led
the study at Cambridge University.
Dementia is a huge global health problem. The World Health
Organization says some 47.5 million people had dementia in 2015, and
that number is rising rapidly as life expectancy increases and
societies age.
The condition is incurable and there are few drugs that can
alleviate the symptoms - which include declining memory, thinking,
behavior, navigational and spatial skills and the gradual loss of
ability to perform everyday tasks.
Publishing his results in the International Journal of
Neuropsychopharmacology, Savulich said that as well as improving
their memory scores in the game, patients who played it retained
more complex visual information than those who didn't.
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Independent experts said the study's findings were encouraging, but
that the app needed be tested against other forms of brain training
in trials involving more people.
"While this type of brain training will not ultimately be able to
prevent or cure memory diseases like dementia, (it is) a promising
way to improve early memory symptoms of the disease," said Tara
Spires-Jones of the University of Edinburgh.
(Reporting by Kate Kelland, editing by David Evans)
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