As we get older, it’s no secret that our body and our mind start to age, causing us to slow down a little – in several ways.

So for many of us, keeping our bodies fit and healthy is a priority, to effectively keep us younger for longer.

But in through all the effort we put into looking young, it’s important to remember that, to hold off some of the most clear signs of ageing, we need to keep our minds fit and healthy too.

How exactly to accomplish this has been something of a mystery for some time. But thanks to a new study, a clinically proven way to keep your brain younger for longer has been developed – and even better, you can do it from the comfort of your own home.

In the study, which was recently published in the journal JMIR Serious Games, 92 cognitively healthy seniors were asked to spend thirty minutes every day either playing a computer game (the control group) or doing brain training exercises on the BrainHQ app (the test group).

This period lasted for ten weeks, after which point brain imaging scans were taken for every participant.

And these brain scans unveiled something fascinating: significant improvements to their cholinergic system, a part of the brain that is fundamental to attention span, problem solving, and memory, for those who’d partaken in thirty minutes of brain training every day.

The control group, who’d played thirty minutes of non-brain-training computer games? There was no notable improvement in their cholinergic system on their brain scans.

Why is this important? Well, the significance of the improvement is not to be understated: in fact, it was sufficient to heal around ten years of age-related decline, as the researchers explained in their paper:

“This is the largest FEOBV-PET trial to date and demonstrates, for the first time in humans, that speed training can reverse losses in cholinergic terminal densities in brain regions vulnerable to age-related cognitive decline. The 2.3% gain in FEOBV binding in the anterior cingulate achieved over a 10-week intervention may offset the estimated 2.5% decline typically observed over a decade of natural aging. These findings clarify the neurochemical basis of cognitive training benefits, showing that speed training upregulates binding in networks that support attention, memory, and executive function.”

Even more so, this is hugely groundbreaking, since – though scientists already knew a lot about the cholinergic system and its role in aging – never before had we understood how to reverse this decline, something that this study offers an answer to.

Since the cholinergic system rapidly declines in Alzheimer’s patients, the team hope to test their findings further in people with early signs of dementia, in the hope that the brain-training app could have similar effects.

If so, this really could be a game-changer.

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