Confirmed improvement in first responders' brain health after shortened training protocol
Cognitive training sessions delivered outside a controlled lab setting - "in the wild" - can lead to lasting brain health improvements
2021-01-27
(Press-News.org) DALLAS (January 26, 2021) - Many people believe that they can't change their brains, or that their brain health will inevitably decline as they age. But the Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Tactics (SMART) training protocol, created by researchers and clinicians at the Center for BrainHealth®, has been demonstrated over the past two decades to improve cognitive function and psychological well-being in laboratory participants. Recent research suggests that SMART can even make long-lasting improvements to people's brain health when given outside of the lab in short, informal training sessions.
A paper detailing these findings was recently published in Military Medicine. The research was a collaboration between Leanne R. Young, PhD, of Applied Research Associates, Inc. and researchers from the Center for BrainHealth, led by Sandra Bond Chapman, PhD, founder and chief director, and Jennifer Zientz, MS, CCC/SLP, head of clinical services.
Participants included 74 police officers and 425 total veterans, reservists, National Guard members and active-duty soldiers. First responders like them face uncertainty and stress every day at their jobs and have demanding, unpredictable schedules, so SMART - normally delivered to participants in the lab over a 12-week period - was tailored to their schedules.
The researchers wanted to test whether shorter workshops outside of the lab could have similar effects on participants' brain health. Trained clinicians delivered between six and ten hours of SMART over two to three days.
As expected, participants' overall cognitive function improved after SMART; for instance, both police officers and military personnel demonstrated an average of 20% improvement in innovative thinking skills. Surprisingly, SMART improved participants' integrated reasoning abilities by about 20% if they were military personnel, but not if they were police officers. And SMART improved participants' strategic attention by about 16% if they were police officers, but not if they were military members or veterans.
These differences in how SMART affects participants' cognitive function might be due to differences in their jobs. "Our brains are really driven by our own experiences, and how you use your brain is what makes you good at some things," said Zientz.
Still, the results suggest that various modes of SMART delivery can positively impact people's brain health. "Even in a training that doesn't take an inordinate amount of time, people can learn information, apply the information to their daily lives, and see a positive benefit from it," she continued.
SMART empowered the participants to take charge of their own brain health, including their psychological well-being. Four months after training, military personnel reported less stress and depressive symptoms, as well as more satisfaction and resilience in their lives. This suggests that SMART can produce lasting results when applied in short programs outside of the lab.
Young believes that SMART could even help save lives. "With the rising rates of suicide, both in civilian and military populations, perhaps the most exciting aspect of the study is the impact of the cognitive training on psychological health. I look forward to seeing this work continue as the military builds its arsenal of weapons against anxiety, stress and depression," said Young.
INFORMATION:
Funding for the study was provided in part by the National Institutes of Health, the United States Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity, the Health and Human Services Commission's Texas Veterans + Family Alliance, and Lyda Hill Philanthropies.
About Center for BrainHealth
The Center for BrainHealth®, part of The University of Texas at Dallas, is a research institute committed to enhancing, preserving and restoring brain health across the lifespan. Scientific exploration at the Center for BrainHealth is leading edge, improving lives today and translating groundbreaking discoveries into practical clinical application. By delivering science-based innovations that enhance how people think, work and live, the Center and its Brain Performance Institute™ are empowering people of all ages to unlock their brain potential. Major research areas include the use of functional and structural neuroimaging techniques to better understand the neurobiology supporting cognition and emotion in health and disease.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-01-27
The widespread use of cashless payments including credit cards, debit cards, and mobile apps has made transactions more convenient for consumers. However, results from previous research have shown that such cashless payments can increase consumers' spending on unhealthy food. "Why Do Cashless Payments Increase Unhealthy Consumption? The Decision-Risk Inattention Hypothesis," a newly published article in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, explains this phenomenon by showing how changes in bodily responses to cashless payments influence consumers responses.
Authors Joowon Park, Clarence Lee, and Manoj Thomas propose that cash and cashless payments elicit different levels of negative arousal when making shopping ...
2021-01-27
The development of small hydropower dams is widespread throughout Brazil and elsewhere in the world, vastly overshadowing large hydropower projects. The proliferation of these smaller dams is a response to growing energy and security needs. Their expansion, however, threatens many of the remaining free-flowing rivers and biodiverse tropical regions of the world -- interrupting the migrations of freshwater fishes, on which millions of peoples' livelihoods depend.
A new University of Washington paper published Jan. 11 in Nature Sustainability quantifies these tradeoffs between hydroelectric generation capacity and the impacts on river connectivity ...
2021-01-27
Popular folklore and anecdotal evidence suggest that people in a hypnotic or suggestible state can experience sensory hallucinations, such as perceiving sounds and sights that are not actually there. Reliable scientific evidence of these experiences, however, has been notoriously challenging to obtain because of their subjective nature.
New research published in the journal Psychological Science provides compelling evidence that hypnotic suggestions can help highly susceptible people "see" imaginary objects, equipping them with the missing details needed to solve an otherwise challenging visual puzzle.
"Hypnosis holds intriguing effects on human behavior," said Amir Raz, a researcher at McGill University and coauthor on the paper. "The careful, systematic study of hypnotic phenomena can ...
2021-01-27
BUFFALO, N.Y. - A new study led by a University at Buffalo researcher has identified how specific communication among different brain regions, known as brain connectivity, can serve as a biomarker for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
The research relied on a deep architecture using machine-learning classifiers to identify with 99% accuracy those adults who had received a childhood diagnosis of ADHD many years earlier.
"This suggests that brain connectivity is a stable biomarker for ADHD, at least into childhood, even when an individual's ...
2021-01-27
Amid a sharp economic downturn in 2008, police departments around the United States experienced budget shortfalls that required them to enact cutbacks. A new study examined the effects on crime of budget shortfalls in two New Jersey cities--one of which laid off more than 10 percent of its police force while the other averted layoffs. The study found that the police layoffs were associated with significant increases in overall crime, violent crime, and property crime.
The study, by researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Rutgers University, appears in Justice Evaluation Journal, a publication of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
"Our study suggests that sudden and drastic reductions in the size of a police force via layoffs of police officers ...
2021-01-27
A new machine learning algorithm based on mammograms can estimate the risk of breast cancer in women more accurately than current risk models, according to a study from Adam Yala and colleagues. The algorithm, which was tested with datasets from three large hospitals located worldwide, could help clinicians design guidelines for breast cancer screening that meet the need for early detection while reducing false-positives, test costs, and other issues associated with overscreening. Mammograms are the most common method to screen for breast cancer, as more than 39 million procedures are performed in the U.S. annually. However, their widespread adoption has not gone without ...
2021-01-27
Working to develop new treatments for osteoarthritis, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have genetically engineered cartilage to deliver an anti-inflammatory drug in response to activity similar to the bending of a knee or other motions that put stress on joints.
Among the early symptoms of osteoarthritis is pain in response to such movements -- motions that involve the so-called mechanical loading of a joint. Joint pain that accompanies bending or lifting can make it difficult to perform normal activities. But by altering genes in cartilage cells in the laboratory, the researchers have been able to program them to respond to the mechanical stress associated with movement and weight-bearing ...
2021-01-27
The blog "Ladyplanet. Natürlich Frau sein" is quite certain: "Our cycle is linked to that of the moon. The most obvious connection is the length of the two cycles," it says. The newspaper "Berliner Tagesspiegel" comes to the opposite conclusion: "The length of women's menstrual cycles is an average value, for some it lasts longer, for others it is shorter. Even one and the same woman can have cycles of different lengths. If they really were connected to the lunar cycle, all women would have their fertile days at the same time," the paper's knowledge section reads.
So what is true? A team led by Würzburg chronobiologist Charlotte Förster has now used scientific methods to examine the connection between ...
2021-01-27
Organelles continue to thrive after the cells within which they exist die, a team of University of Bristol scientists have found, overturning previous assumptions that organelles decay too quickly to be fossilised.
As described in the journal Sciences Advances today [27 January], researchers from Bristol's School of Earth Sciences were able to document the decay process of eukaryotic algal cells, showing that nuclei, chloroplasts and pyrenoids (organelles found within chloroplasts) can persist for weeks and months after cell death in eukaryote cells, long enough to be preserved as fossils.
Emily Carlisle, a PhD student from Bristol's School of Earth Sciences and co-author, was able to characterise the transformation of the organelles into ...
2021-01-27
An analysis of long-term menstrual cycle records kept by 22 women for up to 32 years shows that women with cycles lasting longer than 27 days intermittently synchronized with cycles that affect the intensity of moonlight and the moon's gravitational pull. This synchrony was lost as women aged and when they were exposed to artificial light at night. The researchers hypothesized that human reproductive behavior may have been synchronous with the moon during ancient times, but that this changed as modern lifestyles emerged and humans increasingly gained exposure to artificial light ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Confirmed improvement in first responders' brain health after shortened training protocol
Cognitive training sessions delivered outside a controlled lab setting - "in the wild" - can lead to lasting brain health improvements
