Perhaps we still can't teach an old dog new tricks, but we may be able to find a way to sharpen its mind. Elderly people who underwent a brief course of brain training exercises have reasonably improved their memory retention abilities, reasoning skills and processing speed, with effects lasting as long as 10 years.

Researchers in this federally-funded trial studied 2,832 participants with an average age of 73.6 years at the start of the study, and who were measured to be cognitively normal. They segregated this group into three intervention groups and an untrained control group.

Those in the memory-training group were given paper-and-pencil-based activities that helped them to remember word lists and item sequence, text material, and main ideas and details of stories. Those who were assigned to the reason group were taught strategies on problem-solving based on patterns. Those who were in the speed-of-processing training were made to use a computer-based program that taught them how to identify and locate visual information quickly. These trainings involved 10 to 12 sessions that lasted between 60 to 75 minutes each.

Researchers did a series of follow-up studies on the participants one, two three, five, and ten years later. They found that even after five years, those with the training performed better than their untrained counterparts in memory retention, problem-solving, and processing speed. Ten years after the training, another follow-up study was done, and researchers could still detect heightened cognitive abilities in the participants, although those were no longer as significant as the findings after the five-year mark.

All the participants who underwent the training also said that dealing with routine daily activities came easy to them, compared with those who did not undergo the training.

"What we found was pretty astounding. Ten years after the training, there was evidence the effects were durable for the reasoning and the speed training," said George Rebok, an expert on aging and a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who led the study.

This trial, called Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly study, or ACTIVE, was designed to bolster specific cognitive abilities that aging people start to lose grasp of. The National Institute on Aging has already given Rebok a grant to design and computerized version of the memory test, and has already released a request for proposals that can study whether training causes physical changes in the brain.

The study has been published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.