Maintain Your Brain: Protocol of a 3-Year Randomized Controlled Trial of a Personalized Multi-Modal Digital Health Intervention to Prevent Cognitive Decline Among Community Dwelling 55 to 77 Year Olds.

BACKGROUND: Maintain Your Brain (MYB) is a randomized controlled trial of an online multi-modal lifestyle intervention targeting modifiable dementia risk factors with its primary aim being to reduce cognitive decline in an older age cohort. METHODS: MYB aims to recruit 8,500 non-demented community dwelling 55 to 77 year olds from the Sax Institute's 45 and Up Study in New South Wales, Australia. Participants will be screened for risk factors related to four modules that comprise the MYB intervention: physical activity, nutrition, mental health, and cognitive training. Targeting risk factors will enable interventions to be personalized so that participants receive the most appropriate modules. MYB will run for three years and up to four modules will be delivered sequentially each quarter during year one. Upon completing a module, participants will continue to receive less frequent booster activities for their eligible modules (except for the mental health module) until the end of the trial. DISCUSSION: MYB will be the largest internet-based trial to attempt to prevent cognitive decline and potentially dementia. If successful, MYB will provide a model for not just effective intervention among older adults, but an intervention that is scalable for broad use.

Cognitive Training in Parkinson's Disease.

Cognitive impairment is now widely accepted as a fundamental aspect of Parkinson's disease (PD). Given the prevalence of cognitive impairment and the associated impact on well-being, evidence-based interventions are needed. However, while research is continually accumulating in order to better understand the pathology and trajectory of cognitive changes, treatment options lag behind. Nonpharmacological approaches are of particular interest in this group, given the typical polypharmacy already present in PD patients. In this regard, cognitive training (CT) is a relatively new and prominent therapeutic option with accumulating scientific support and increasing public awareness. Research has now established benefits across many different populations, and trials investigating the use of CT specifically in PD are becoming more common. We offer a brief summary of CT and its efficacy in PD samples to date, as well as discuss areas requiring further exploration in this group. Crucially, we suggest that CT should be supported as a research priority in PD, given both proven and potential benefits as a noninvasive and well-tolerated behavioral intervention for cognitive impairment.

Antisaccade errors reveal cognitive control deficits in Parkinson's disease with freezing of gait.

Freezing of gait is a poorly understood symptom of Parkinson's disease (PD) that is commonly accompanied by executive dysfunction. This study employed an antisaccade task to measure deficits in inhibitory control in patients with freezing, and to determine if these are associated with a specific pattern of grey matter loss using voxel-based morphometry. PD patients with (n = 15) and without (n = 11) freezing along with 10 age-matched controls were included. A simple prosaccade task was administered, followed by a second antisaccade task that required subjects to either look towards or away from a peripheral target. Behavioral results from the antisaccade task were entered as covariates in the voxel-based morphometry analysis. Patient and control groups performed equally well on the first task. However, patients with freezing were significantly worse on the second, which was driven by a specific impairment in suppressing their responses toward the target on the antisaccade trials. Impaired antisaccade performance was associated with grey matter loss across bilateral visual and fronto-parietal regions. These results suggest that patients with freezing have a significant deficit of inhibitory control that is associated with volume reductions in regions crucial for orchestrating both complex motor behaviors and cognitive control. These findings highlight the inter-relationship between freezing of gait and cognition and confirm that dysfunction along common neural pathways is likely to mediate the widespread cognitive dysfunction that emerges with this symptom.