BRAIN-TRAINING STUDY: Sign up to help yourself and others
Elyce Turba is all too familiar with the heartbreak of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.
Her mother passed away in May after enduring the debilitating effects of dementia for six years. She’d lived in a long-term care facility for the past four years, and Turba recalls how she felt when seeing her mom, and other patients, during visits.
“Anything we can do to try to understand more about dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, I want to be a part of it,” says Turba, a clinical research nurse at Moffitt Cancer Center. “The worst part was when I would visit her and she was having a good day, she would ask, ‘Am I going home today?’ I would tell her that would happen very soon, just as soon as her legs got stronger. But with the dementia and other physical ailments, there was no way that was going to happen.”
Her personal and professional experiences prompted Turba to participate in the landmark Preventing Alzheimer’s with Cognitive Training (PACT) study through USF. Funded by the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, the study examines whether computerized brain-training exercises can reduce the risk of cognitive impairment and dementia. Additional funding was awarded last year to study blood markers for early detection of Alzheimer’s disease.
This is the largest study of its kind to date. It builds upon a long history of research examining the effectiveness of speed-of-processing training.
“There already is too much information for our brains to process, meaning we have to prioritize information, but our ability to do that lessens over time,” says principal investigator Jennifer O’Brien, associate professor and USF St. Petersburg chair of psychology. “This relates to what we call executive functioning, and that gets harder as we age. Speed-of-processing training is a visual-based computer program that asks us to pay attention to some information and ignore distractions to help us get quicker at handling information.”
Similar studies showed strong evidence that this training has a positive impact on such things as balance and mobility, driving and perceived quality of life, she says.
“On the surface, it may seem strange that you’re sitting at a computer, you’re pressing buttons on a keyboard, why would that then impact how you navigate the world around you?” she says.
“To navigate the world around you, you’re taking in visual inputs that affect how quickly you walk, how you navigate barriers and impediments. Being able to process that information faster allows you to compensate better with your decision-making and your actions. If you’re driving and you see a person crossing the street in front of you, but your brain can’t tell your foot to press on the brake quickly enough, there will be problems.”
USF is recruiting healthy, older adult volunteers from the Tampa Bay area through December for the study. Participants must be 65 or older with no signs of cognitive impairment or dementia. The study especially needs African American/Black and Hispanic participants — populations at the highest risk for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.
Study centers are located at USF Tampa, USF St. Petersburg and Parkway University Center in Lakeland. Participation requires two in-person visits, then computerized training exercises in-home or at a study site. Participants will be asked to return about three years later for a third study visit.
More information is available at the PACT study website, www.pactstudy.org, or by calling 352-405-0342 in Tampa, 727-873-4090 in St. Petersburg and 863-800-0835 in Lakeland.
Turba, who is in her third year of participating in the study, hopes to make a contribution to science.
“It may not help me, but it may help someone else,” she says. “Hopefully we learn some clues that we didn’t know before.”
