Do games really help fight Alzheimer's?

They can help with memory issues but will never help enough to diminish the disorder

Nothing has proved to stop Alzheimer's disease. We are not sure what causes Alzheimer's disease. However, since Alzheimer's disease is characterized by gradual loss of short term and long term memory, the current thought in the medical community is to "strengthen" the connections in the brain that are usually affected. "Strengthening" is creating thicker neural connecting tissues through repeated use. That is why you can sing the ABC song or "Mary had a little lamb" since you repeated it over and over again as a child. Lack of repetition is why I passed my Calculus classes but don't remember the information now (never use it in daily life or professional life). So, games that involve problem-solving tend to be helpful but there is no study that "proves" this stops this disease.

I don't know about fighting dementia, but solving puzzles can create new neurone pathways, as can maths and learning a foreign language. (Something to consider as we age, before we develop any dementia.)

Mum had a stroke in 2011 and didn't recover because her husband couldn't bear to see her struggle when relearning how to do simple tasks, so he did everything for her - including speaking for her when she was slow to answer anyone. She needed more processing time, at first, but he continued (despite me asking him not to, and to let me talk to my mum) even when she, briefly, started to become herself again.

What saved Mum from becoming a virtual vegetable was that her husband started to put quiz shows on every afternoon - Eggheads, The Chase, The Weakest Link, etc. When Mum answered, it was a shock because she hadn't been allowed to do anything for herself and had shrunk inwards, rarely speaking. She'd also been diagnosed with vascular dementia.
Working out the visual puzzles on Catchphrase was also really good for her.
Not all, but certain puzzles can help with the connections in the brain, even though some connections have died.
I think it was doing puzzles and quizzes every day that slowed down the dementia. It was only this year, as Mum became more sick, that she started to show classic signs of dementia. By this point, Mum was slowly dying, and so was her brain.

I don't think, though, that anyone should derive much hope from this report alone. The amount of brain damage as well as the individual's baseline capacity for learning new things, or previous knowledge to recall, would all be factors, meaning that some people could be helped by puzzles more than others.

Also, there are other factors in how quickly dementia affects a person. In my mum's case, she had epilepsy and numerous TIAs, all of which are attacks on the brain. Then, there are other health issues which can affect the health of the brain, such as anything that affects nutrients and oxygen getting to the brain.

Keeping our brains active is important at all stages of our lives, but is often neglected as we age. I think we could all do ourselves a favour by stimulating and nourishing our brains now, not waiting until the damage is done.

Here is the research conclusion. If you want to read it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7279699/

Conclusion:
Serious games have an important place in dementia care and plenty of related studies are presented. Various kinds of games can be applied into dementia care, namely board games, video games, virtual reality games. Also, a broad range of techniques are used to develop games, among which are Somatosensory technology, 3D graphics generation technology, sensor technology and so on. However, serious games are no panacea for dementia care. Since they are more effective in treating early-stage and middle-stage dementia while more futile faced with late-stage dementia. Likewise, the research on SGDC mainly focuses on the treatment of early-stage or middle-stage dementia. Besides, although there are abundant research results, a unified category and the standard assessment model of therapeutic effectiveness both are not available for SGDC. Considering these challenges, the following directions are worth to be further developed.
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More therapies, like music therapy, reminiscence therapy, can be integrated with serious games to improve effectiveness of games therapy and provide more new ideas for the design of serious games.
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A Serious Games Hospital for dementia care can be established to offer systematic and professional treatment for patients with dementia. For instance, different departments can be set according to different symptoms in Serious Game Hospital.
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To give an explicit guideline for researchers, clear category architecture should be presented. For example, the category can be based on different symptoms, such as mild, moderate or severe cognitive impairments along with some integrated symptoms.
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To choose effective serious games for patients, the professional assessment model deserves further study. Researchers can pay more attention to multi-group participation (e.g. patients, professionals, etc.) and multi-method combination (e.g. questionnaire tests, physiological signals, etc.).
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For some common video games, patients can play on their own at home. Whereas, for some VR games with expensive equipment, most patients can not play at home by themselves. In the face of this situation, the hospital can equip the community with relevant resources, which not only allows more patients to obtain abundant medical resources but also reduces the burden on the hospital. Moreover, this also requires the government to make relevant public interest policies to support.
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SGDC is a cross-field of computer science and medical science. In the development of SGDC, game designers and medical researchers need to maintain frequent and close communication, which can design interesting and effective serious games. In addition, the cultivation of talents must be promoted at the intersections of computer science and medical science.

As an effective treatment for dementia, SGDC is intensively studied. However, with the long-term study, there is no systematic review of the development stage for SGDC. To fill this gap, we investigate the development route of SGDC and divided its development into 3 stages: board games stage, video games stage and VR games stage, which can help researchers to better understand its development quickly. Apart from that, we found that a unified category framework of SGDC is still unavailable to regulate its development. Considering this, we analyze characteristics of dementia symptoms of different stages and present a category of SGDC based on it to encourage developers to design more symptom-targeted serious games. What’s more, it is essential for an effective treatment that reliable assessment methods should be formulated. Given that, we review existing assessment methods and present an assessment model with multi-group participation and multi-method combination which is more comprehensive than those existing methods. Finally, we discuss the present SGDC and its challenges and put forward 6 d

I think all we can do is try. It's an art, not a science. Each person with dementia is so different. My husband did not respond well to any of the suggested activities. He'd lie to his psychiatrist about having done the activities. As the disease progressed, he would tell me to "turn it off" whenever I played his favorite music or tv show. It seemed everything agitated him. Nothing I did was right. He'd be yelling at me that I was making coffee all wrong, that I'd break the coffee machine, that I should not be cooking, that "there's nothing left...(I'm) using up all the utensils (??)..." and on and on. And none of the Teepa Snow techniques helped. At the onset of this dementia rabbit hole, he was the poster child for health with six pack abs, healthy eating, etc. This journey has been nothing short of a huge roller coaster ride.

Keeping the brain active does help. I noticed for myself, after I left my career at 75, I noticed I am not as sharp as I would like to be.


I love the game shows, the ones where the audience can play along at home. There are the old TV game shows, which I like better than the re-boot new ones which I find too noisy, the old reruns such as "Password", and "Classic Concentration". "Match Game" with Gene Rayburn is comical plus the 6 guest stars us old timers can relate to, such as Eva Gabor, Charles Nelson Reilly, Fannie Flag, Brett Summers, Patty Duke, etc.


The newer game shows such as "The Floor" with Rob Lowe, and "The 1% Club" are really good to test one's knowledge ;) Also, "Wheel of Fortune". I also like "Price is Right" and "America Says" "Chain Reaction" "Common Knowledge" and "Master Minds" most of these are on the Games Show channel. Then there is "Jeopardy" if one is super smart :)

Yes, games of any type help fight memory degradation. You may not see it, however, it definitely slows memory loss down.

So does physical exercise (coordination between brain and muscle), reading (forces the type to track across the page, forces brain to interpret and read words, exercises short term memory because the entire paragraph is a concept, not just the individual words), walking (balancing and coordination and just remembering how to move the body in a forward direction), driving (hand to eye coordination, brain multi-tasking)

For normal people, we take all these things for granted. For a person with memory loss, they have to work hard to do these things.

It isn't easy for the person or the care giver to deal with memory loss or someone with impaired memory.

Matariki: Perhaps games do indeed keep the mind active.

The computerized games (for a fee) are heavily marketed to help the brain but I don't think the studies are solid that they do more than things you can do on your own.

Playing card games or leaning new card games where you interact with people is another suggestion.

I think the brain piece of preventing alzheimer's is about learning new patterns. Learning a second language, learning a musical instrument and leaning new dances is said to delay brain decline by 3-4 years.

Fitness and activity are important to maintaining brain function.

Healthy diet is also key (low to no sugars, less alcohol etc)

I've played word games since I was a kid. Crosswords, cryptograms, sudoku, you name it. So I hope they DO help keep the brain active. I think they can't hurt, and none of the "experts" know for sure.

My Mom was an advid reader and did crossword puzzles, did not kerp her from having Dementia. And why did she have it, no idea. She did not smoke but my Dad did. Didn't drink. But she did take statins which have been found to contribute to cognitive problems.

I was told that what is good is exercising both sides of the brain. If righthanded, try to use your left hand. Like when brushing your teeth, change hands. Doing the same thing over and over does not challenge the brain, learning new things does.

IMO ALZ is hereditary. It runs on my Dads side. Ome of the others are caused by lifestyle.

No, games do not fight Alzheimer's or any other kind of dementia. They are often a great help to caregivers though. They can be a god-send to caregivers who who have deal with these people and take care of them.

Games are often very good at diverting the person's attention away from a dementia-loop (if they're in one) and are repeating incessantly or compusively obsessing over nothing. Games also help to keep the person with dementia occupied. When they have something to do this cuts back on the anxiety and panicking over nothing. If a person with dementia isn't all worked up and freaking out, it's easier for everyone including them, to get their care done.

A person with Alzheimer's/dementia (depending on how far gone they are) is usually like having a very unpleasant, adult-sized toddler. When the child/toddler is having a tantrum and you give them something that captures their attention like a toy or a game, this often puts the brakes on the tantrum because they're more interested in what you're giving them then they are at carrying on.

Games and puzzles are a good distraction. They don't fight anything except boredom.

Once someone is diagnosed with any of the dementias there is nothing that will help them or the progression of the disease, but if you're wanting to keep your own brain sharp as long as possible then by all means do many different brain type games to keep you on your "game"(pun intended)so hopefully you won't develop dementia.

Some dementias are inherited and the person will get it no matter what. Others are brought on by health issues, like Wernicke-Korsakoff dementia (from long-term alcoholism), stroke, normal pressure hydroencephaly, early-onset ALZ (which is one of many types of dementias), etc.

Since medical science doesn't even know for sure what causes some types of dementias there is thus no way to know what will stave it off. It is very difficult to do clinical studies since there's no way to know if a person's dementia would have occurred at that point in time or whether it was the result of game playing. Plus the longer one's journey into dementia, the less fruitful their participation since their abilities to know and express what is going on in their minds is becoming cloudier.

That being said I think keeping the mind active and learning new and challenging things is still good and beneficial, even from a mental health standpoint, since depression is a problem that comes with age-related decline.

I suspect that if you play the same mindless game over and over , no.

But if your a senior and play new games and keep learning new things and keep your brain active it can help prevent dementia. It may help progression of early dementia, and could help, but that just my thoughts.

But if your playing the same circle a word over and over, that you have played for years, I suspect no.

In addition to engaging them with old TV shows, I'd add -- playing music from their youth or singing simple songs they likely remember from church or holidays. My grandmother surprised me by knowing all the words to Jingle Bells, for example, and enthusiastically sang along with me while it played.

I'm not sure if a stimulus prompt like old music/songs helps fight the progression of the disease, but they can be pretty powerful regardless. See Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory [2014] Documentary. It's on YouTube.

Dementia is caused by many things including strokes (lack of blood to the brain and resultant changes to blood vessels), injury to the brain, amyloid plaques in the brain, shrinkage of the brain, alcohol use, and so many other things. The brain changes progressively and thus it does not, cannot, and never will again work as it did previous to the changes.

So no, games will not help. Mahjong can't repair the changes in the brain. Working puzzles will not repair the changes. Such ideas are what the family of the afflicted HOPES will restore their loved ones to who they were before dementia. HOPE is a wonderful thing, but so far, it's pointless to HOPE that there's a cure out there somewhere. Nothing cures dementia.

I've been caregiver for four family members, all of whom had various types of dementia. Trying games and puzzles only brought on confusion, refusal, sometimes laughing (because they don't know what it is or what to say), and incomprehensible comments.

I've found more mental engagement in my family members with old TV reruns like Bonanza, Flipper, Little House on the Prairie and Elvis movies. Seriously.

Nothing is yet proven to help Alzheimer's or other dementias.
As you can imagine it would be difficult to imagine how to measure a patient ongoing. If there is no lack of progress is that because they didn't do games? If there is better progress is that due to games? Or not. How could such a thing be realistically measured.

I can tell you one place that games CAN help us and that is in long covid where the brain is effected in a way that is a sort of fog of confusing and an inability to focus. They are finding that games are helping people to relearn focus. Interesting!