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As you ring in the New Year tonight, be careful not to kill too many brain cells. Keeping your brain healthy is the key to achieving your New Year’s resolutions so you can enjoy the health, wealth, and happiness you have always wanted.
Make 2010 the year you focus on better brain health. Your reward will be a better life and a better body.
Happy New Year!
I have a good friend who is getting ready to retire. I told him that even though he is retiring from work, it doesn’t mean he should retire his brain and that he needs to find other ways to keep his brain active.
As I always say, when it comes to the brain, use it or lose it. New learning is essential to maintaining optimum brain function and is an important part of delaying or preventing cognitive impairment as you age.
Some great ways for retirees to keep their brains sharp include taking classes at a community college, traveling, or volunteering. In fact, a recent study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that seniors who volunteered as tutors in an elementary school improved their cognitive function.
The research team used a brain imaging technique called functional MRI to analyze the brains of 17 older female volunteers who were at high risk for age-related cognitive impairment. Nine of the women spent six months tutoring elementary school children while the other volunteers were placed on a waiting list to begin tutoring the following year.
At the end of the trial, the nine women who tutored showed improved cognitive function and their brain scans showed gains in the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex compared to the women who did not participate as tutors.
This study shows that by learning new things and keeping your brain active, you can improve cognitive function at any age.
As a society, we need to stop thinking of retirement as a time to retire our brains. If you are nearing retirement or are already retired, I urge you to find ways to keep your brain sharp. I offer a number of suggestions on how to improve brain function as you age in my book Preventing Alzheimer’s.
This holiday season, I wish you peace, happiness, and love “” and, above all, good brain health. That’s because without good brain health, you are less likely to have peace, happiness, and love in your life.
Make 2010 the year you start to seriously focus on the health of your brain so you can have the best life and the best body ever!
I have worked with thousands of young children who have problems with hyperactivity. One of the questions I typically ask their parents is, “How much sleep does the child get each night?”
In many cases, I find that these young children are not getting adequate sleep, which can worsen their hyperactivity. In addition, being hyperactive or having ADD can sometimes cause sleep disturbances.
I have found that when these children get an adequate amount of restful sleep, it can diminish symptoms of hyperactivity.
A new study confirms what I have seen in my own practice. A research team including Canadian, French, and Irish researchers studied data from the mothers of 2,057 children aged from 18 months old to five years old and found a link between hyperactivity and lack of sleep. In particular, the connection was strongest among boys.
In this study, which appears in the journal Pediatrics, the researchers found that children who regularly slept at least 11 hours a night had a low incidence of hyperactivity.
How much sleep do children really need? According to the National Sleep Foundation, here are the requirements:
Age Range
1-3 years old 12-14 hours of sleep
3-5 years old 11-13 hours of sleep
5-12 years old 10-11 hours of sleep
13-19 years old 9 hours of sleep
If you have a child with hyperactivity or ADD, get tips on how to deal with them more effectively with my Raising ADD Kids mp3 . I have three ADD children myself so I know how tough it can be, and I know that the strategies discussed on this mp3 work.
For years, I have been trying to get the word out that head injuries, even mild ones, can cause serious damage to the brain and can change your life forever.
After viewing more than 54,000 brain scans, it has become very clear to me that what many people think of as mild head trauma can have a significantly negative effect on people’s brains and can significantly change their lives and their ability to look and feel their best.
Studies show that people who have suffered brain injuries, even mild ones, often experience emotional, behavioral, or cognitive problems. When you have trouble thinking or reasoning, you can’t make the best decisions for your body.
Suffering a brain injury is also associated with a higher incidence of alcoholism and drug abuse””both of which lead to premature aging, possible weight problems, potentially devastating health conditions, and homelessness.
Many times, these injuries go unnoticed, in part because mental health professionals never look at brain function. And CT and MRI scans, which show the structure of the brain rather than activity in the brain, may appear to be normal even when there is damage.
A new study in the journal Radiology shows how important other types of brain imaging can be in diagnosing potentially life-changing brain injuries. The researchers used diffusion tensor imaging, a different type of MRI, to determine that even mild head trauma can seriously injure the brain
The research team evaluated 20 emergency room patients who had been involved in motor vehicle accidents or falls to determine if there was a brain injury. They also performed imaging on 20 control subjects.
They found that the diffusion tensor imaging technique revealed problems in the prefrontal cortex that resulted in impaired executive function.
Imaging the brain is critical in the case of head trauma. Even more important is preventing brain injuries. Protect your brain.
