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Six million of us have full-blown Alzheimer’s disease, including 10 percent of those over 65 and half of those over 80.

And many other types of dementia or cognitive impairment are commonly associated with age. 68-year-old actor Bruce Willis is the latest tragic example in the public eye.

So when it comes to dementia and the aging brain, any news is good news. And this week we had not one but two pieces of promising news. One is relevant to us right now, and the other hints at something potentially much bigger down the road.

Let’s start with the here and now. Some surprising new research from the University of California Riverside suggests that we may be able to rejuvenate our aging brains and reduce the number of those senile periods later in life than previously realized.

Remember how fast your brain was when you were young? Like most people, I assumed it was because my brain was neurally fresh back then, and perhaps more efficient. There is something to that.

But some scientists have been suggesting that this is because of the school environment. Then we’re stuck in class all day every day, simultaneously learning a variety of skills from composition to trigonometry. We have teachers and are in a social environment with other kids learning the same thing at the same time.

Some scientists have wondered if we could make our brains more efficient if we tried to replicate some environment.

So that’s what the researchers at UC Riverside did. And it worked.

In two separate studies, older adults spent 7 hours a week over 3 to 3 ½ months learning three different skills. The participants had an average age of 66 in the first study and 69 in the second. His skills include Spanish, photography, painting, music composition and iPad operation. They spent two hours every week. Each week they spent an hour discussing one topic. Crucially, these were new skills for each participant. No one was learning what they already knew.

Overall, the time and commitment for those 12 to 15 weeks was “similar to a full undergraduate course load,” the researchers reported. “Our intervention includes new skills education, motivational talks and peer social support, as we originally intended to model stimulating and motivating learning environments for children, adolescents and adults.

Here’s the payoff: Participants in the study showed dramatic improvements—and not just in the three new skills they learned. They also showed “significant increases” in cognitive abilities on a battery of tests designed to measure a broad set of cognitive abilities, the researchers reported. That includes tests of both thinking skills and memory.

And these improvements weren’t just temporary. The study participants showed cognitive gains during the program and at the end, and further gains up to one year after.

“The elderly continued to improve their cognitive abilities even one year after the end of the intervention,” the researchers reported. “The current study showed significant improvements up to one year after the learning intervention ended.” The findings “show that a multiskills education intervention has the potential for long-term cognitive improvement in older adults.

Wow.

One caveat is that the two studies were small: six people in one, 27 in the other. Other groups of participants were not ethnically diverse. We need to see if other, larger studies replicate the findings.

But research suggests that enrolling in programs at your local adult education center will only teach you Spanish or oil painting or Thai food and get you out of the house. They also refresh your mind for a long time.

Meanwhile, there was other promising news regarding dementia. Scientists have long known that people with Alzheimer’s or other debilitating dementias may experience sleep problems in the years before the disease develops. The relationship is not fully understood: does disturbed sleep lead to brain degeneration or vice versa?

But researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have made a small, but potentially big, discovery.

An over-the-counter sleeping pill may help.

A few patients who took Suvorexant, a pill made by Merck

MRK

And marketed under the brand name Belsomra, it showed sharp and immediate reductions in two of Alzheimer’s key biological markers.

These markers are the “amyloid-beta” and “tau” proteins that appear in the brains of people with dementia.

The study involved 38 people between the ages of 45 and 65, some of whom were given a maximum of 20 milligrams of the sleep aid before bed. Others were given 10 milligrams. Others were given a placebo. The researchers tap their spinal cord every two hours to analyze their cerebrospinal fluid.

“The amount of amyloid in the cerebrospinal fluid of people who received a high dose of suvorexant was reduced by 10% to 20% and the amount of tau key, known as hyperphosphorylated tau, was reduced by 10% to 15% compared to people who received a placebo,” the researchers reported. They repeated it.

what do you mean? Maybe nothing. Maybe too much.

“This is a small, concept study,” cautions the study’s senior author Brendan Lucey, a professor of neurology and director of the University of Washington’s Center for Sleep Medicine. “It’s too late to interpret it as a reason to start taking suvorexant every night for people worried about developing Alzheimer’s disease.”

That said, these results are “very encouraging.” This drug is already available and safe, and we now have evidence that it affects the levels of proteins critical to driving Alzheimer’s disease.

There are many potential breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s, and none of them have been released yet. There is currently no cure and there is very little we can do to stop the disease, let alone stop it. A new drug that can slow the progression early is expensive, and currently not covered by Medicare.

But if it turns out that the right sleep aids can make a difference – that would be huge. Follow it.

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