BBC news Puzzle solving won’t solve mental decline

[B72]

In the BBC news today. I wish I could do a link, I can’t. Maybe someone can tell me how?

Well, I always doubted it had any effect. What about Harold Wilson and other high achievers, like Iris Murdock? You can’t say they didn’t use their brains.


Just something else to drive people mad, and make you feel bad if you hate (and are rubbish at) (like me), Soduko. And it was something to make people who were/or are aware that their mental capacity is declining feel it might be their own fault because of their lifestyle.

 

[Guzelle]

I agree I never thought it did either. With vascular dementia it’s your heart that’s not pumping blood round the brain properly. How can doing a puzzle help that!

 

[canary]

it was something to make people who were/or are aware that their mental capacity is declining feel it might be their own fault because of their lifestyle.

I totally agree; and if its their own fault then policy makers and people in the "system" dont have to feel they have to improve things.

 

[karaokePete]

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46507024

That's the link.

 

[jugglingmum]

I thought this had been disproved some time ago, and the thinking was that doing what you've always done doesn't help, but learning new things does. There are plenty of 'mail order subscription ' magazines out there, preying on this, my mum had several coming through her post when things were redirected.

When crisis hit and my mum could no longer cook a meal, or drive, or understand that she hadn't renewed the car insurance, or why turning the electric off and living in an unheated house was unsafe, she was still able to complete the majority of the cryptic crossword in the telegraph every day, a skill I don't posses (my brother does - but still said mum was better than him at that stage).

 

[Witzend]

Very glad to see this. Makes a change from (some) people trying to imply that getting dementia is somehow your own fault - if you'd only done this or that, you wouldn't have got it.

I have more or less cut what little contact I had with an aunt (my mother's much younger sister) who told me it was my mother's own fault that she got dementia - if she'd only been more like the sprightly 90 year olds at her church, endlessly socialising, she'd never have got it.
She's the sort of person who's invariably right about everything, , so if I ever countered with, 'How about Ronald Reagan, Maggie Thatcher, etc. then?' she would always counter with something she'd read somewhere, that was *definitely* 100% correct.

Luckily the know-it-all, judgemental old baggage lives in Canada, so I never have to see her anyway.

 

[Duggies-girl]

I used to work with a consultant pathologist. Cleverest man I have ever known. He got dementia .

There's no telling .

 

[Sarasa]

What I thought was interesting about the article was that what did make a bit of a difference was regularly doing intellectual exercises throughout your life. You still might get dementia but your brain would have a 'higher cognitive point' from which to decline.
My mother and my mother in law are both ninety. They are both intelligent women who held responsible jobs in their working lives, they also both have (undiagnosed) dementia. The only difference is that my mother had very little formal schooling, whereas my MiL is educated to PhD level. My mother now finds talking about abstract things difficult. She'll say something like 'I like Dostoevsky' but couldn't actually discuss one of his books. Mother in law, who can no longer remember how to lay a table and sometimes forgets where the loo is will, when asked about Dickens (her specialist subject) will go into full blown lecturer mode. I do creative writing, and show her my poems etc. Her critiques are always spot on and her help useful. It's as though MiL's brain has something solid to work with, which my mother does not have.

 

[LynneMcV]

I recall re-educating a locum GP three years ago when I had sought some urgent medical help for my husband and I was more of less told to take him home and encourage him to do puzzles!

I was fuming. My husband was a very intelligent man with a huge general knowledge and vocabulary. He thrived on being able to do the most complicated and cryptic of crosswords and puzzles daily from a young age. He was never happier than when he had a real challenge to test his knowledge.

He stopped because his brain was failing, making the simplest of puzzles out of his reach. His brain was failing because he had an incurable disease, not because he wasn't doing puzzles and using his brain.

Did that locum GP look sheepish after I said my piece! I never saw him again but I can but hope he never offered such glib words to other dementia patients from then on.

 

[MrCanuck]

Puzzles are a good way to identify executive thinking decline.

My mom did word puzzles very day for as long as I can remember. We gave her a massive 500 Word puzzle book when she was hospitalized after a fall and broke her ankle. She was fine for a few weeks and then began to decline rapidly, was diagnosed with vascular dementia and ended up in care in a matter of weeks. When I was cleaning out her care home room this Spring after she passed I found that puzzle book.

Looking through the puzzles was like looking back in time. The first 50 or so where completed normally, then the next few she had corrected some mistakes with the the number of corrections increasing. After that there were puzzles abandoned half way through with ever increasing errors. Lastly a few puzzles were nothing more than scribbles followed by the remaining, untouched, ones.