Abstract
An active lifestyle as well as cognitive and physical training (PT) may benefit cognition by increasing cognitive reserve, but the underlying neurobiological mechanisms of this reserve capacity are not well understood. To investigate these mechanisms of cognitive reserve, we focused on electrophysiological correlates of cognitive performance, namely on an event-related measure of auditory memory and on a measure of global coherence. Both measures have shown to be sensitive markers for cognition and might therefore be suitable to investigate potential training- and lifestyle-related changes. Here, we report on the results of an electrophysiological sub-study that correspond to previously published behavioral findings. Altogether, 65 older adults with subjective or objective cognitive impairment and aged 60–88 years were assigned to a 10-week cognitive (n = 19) or a 10-week PT (n = 21) or to a passive control group (n = 25). In addition, self-reported lifestyle was assessed at baseline. We did not find an effect of both training groups on electroencephalography (EEG) measures of auditory memory decay or global coherence (ps ≥ 0.29) and a more active lifestyle was not associated with improved global coherence (p = 0.38). Results suggest that a 10-week unimodal cognitive or PT and an active lifestyle in older adults at risk for dementia are not strongly related to improvements in electrophysiological correlates of cognition.
Highlights
The number of people with cognitive deficits and dementia is growing due to increasing life expectancy and demographic change
It was restricted to Group (CT vs. waitlist control (WLC) and physical training (PT) vs. WLC) × Time as fixed effect with mismatch negativity (MMN) as dependent variable because we focused on the effect of auditory cognitive training (CT) on MMN and did not expect a positive effect of PT or a positive association between lifestyle and MMN Significant lifestyle associations for the period of 10 weeks were revealed by a significant Lifestyle × Time interaction, while training effects on EEG indices were indicated by a significant Group × Time interaction
The number of trials was left for averaging in the Optimum–1 paradigm as well as in the Memory Trace paradigm can be found in the Supplementary Material
Summary
The number of people with cognitive deficits and dementia is growing due to increasing life expectancy and demographic change. The meaning of the detection of pathological cognitive decline as well as its prevention and slowing down became an increasingly important issue. For decades the assessment of cognitive decline in healthy aging and in dementia had been mainly based on neuropsychological data. Recently surrogate biomarkers in cerebrospinal fluid and neuroimaging have evolved. In our recent studies we described two sensitive electroencephalography (EEG) markers for cognition. These are resting-state global coherence (Laptinskaya et al, 2019) and a novel mismatch negativity (MMN) index for auditory memory decay, namely MMN (Laptinskaya et al, 2018)
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