Reading and other mental activities all help to preserve the memory in old age, researchers have found.
The effect of "mental exercise" in staving off illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease has been controversial.
But the latest study sought to identify the impact on general memory rather than on brain disease.
Researchers in Chicago, USA, studied the mental capacity of nearly 300 elderly people over a period of six years, also questioning them about their lifetime mental habits.
The volunteers had also agreed that their brains should be studied after their deaths – and this was used to identify the development of disease.
Reporting in the journal Neurology, the researchers say that people who continued to be mentally active into old age enjoyed a 32% reduction in the rate of decline of memory.
Researcher Dr Robert Wilson, of Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, said: "Based on this, we shouldn’t underestimate the effects of every day activities, such as reading and writing, on our children, ourselves and our parents or grandparents."
Neurology 3 July 2013
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