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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next >> Prior interventions have looked primarily at people who already had cognitive deficits or functional limitations, thus focusing on remediation rather than prevention.
The current trial is the first multicenter, randomized controlled trial to look at the long-term outcomes of cognitive interventions on the daily functioning of older adults still living independently.
The study, which appears in the Dec. 20 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, involved over 2,800 adults aged 65 to 96 who were living independently in six U.S. cities. More than one-quarter of the participants were African-American. Five-year follow-up data was available for two-thirds of the original sample.
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Participants were divided into four groups: One received 10 sessions of training for memory, one an equal amount of training for reasoning; and the third training for speed of processing. They also got four-session booster training at 11 and 35 months.
A fourth group received no training and served as the control group.
When tested right after training, 87 percent of individuals in speed-training, 74 percent of those in reasoning-training and 26 percent of those in memory-training showed improvements.
After five years, individuals in all three intervention groups reported more ease in performing those instrumental activities of daily living than the control group, although the effect was only significant for the reasoning group.
The booster training had an effect on the speed-of-processing group but not on the other two groups.
The strength and durability of the results were surprising to the authors. "There's virtually nothing in the literature to give us grounds to expect this, except our own optimism," Marsiske said. "The durability of the effects really is unprecedented. There was also a much more diverse sample than any other cognitive research had allowed. We showed that the training worked well for a broad cross-section of people."
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