I recently read an article (https://themahjong.com/blog/who-solves-puzzles-a-study-of-the-online-puzzle-game-audience) about the fact that a lot of elderly people play mood games. I was wondering if you've noticed this? Do games really help fight alzheimer's?
So no, games will not help. Mahjong can't repair the changes in the brain. Working puzzles will not repair the changes. Such ideas are what the family of the afflicted HOPES will restore their loved ones to who they were before dementia. HOPE is a wonderful thing, but so far, it's pointless to HOPE that there's a cure out there somewhere. Nothing cures dementia.
I've been caregiver for four family members, all of whom had various types of dementia. Trying games and puzzles only brought on confusion, refusal, sometimes laughing (because they don't know what it is or what to say), and incomprehensible comments.
I've found more mental engagement in my family members with old TV reruns like Bonanza, Flipper, Little House on the Prairie and Elvis movies. Seriously.
As you can imagine it would be difficult to imagine how to measure a patient ongoing. If there is no lack of progress is that because they didn't do games? If there is better progress is that due to games? Or not. How could such a thing be realistically measured.
I can tell you one place that games CAN help us and that is in long covid where the brain is effected in a way that is a sort of fog of confusing and an inability to focus. They are finding that games are helping people to relearn focus. Interesting!
I'm not sure if a stimulus prompt like old music/songs helps fight the progression of the disease, but they can be pretty powerful regardless. See Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory [2014] Documentary. It's on YouTube.
But if your a senior and play new games and keep learning new things and keep your brain active it can help prevent dementia. It may help progression of early dementia, and could help, but that just my thoughts.
But if your playing the same circle a word over and over, that you have played for years, I suspect no.
Games and other activities can keep a person with dementia occupied and in turn it keeps them calm.
They don't prevent dementia and they don't treat it.
Since medical science doesn't even know for sure what causes some types of dementias there is thus no way to know what will stave it off. It is very difficult to do clinical studies since there's no way to know if a person's dementia would have occurred at that point in time or whether it was the result of game playing. Plus the longer one's journey into dementia, the less fruitful their participation since their abilities to know and express what is going on in their minds is becoming cloudier.
That being said I think keeping the mind active and learning new and challenging things is still good and beneficial, even from a mental health standpoint, since depression is a problem that comes with age-related decline.
So does physical exercise (coordination between brain and muscle), reading (forces the type to track across the page, forces brain to interpret and read words, exercises short term memory because the entire paragraph is a concept, not just the individual words), walking (balancing and coordination and just remembering how to move the body in a forward direction), driving (hand to eye coordination, brain multi-tasking)
For normal people, we take all these things for granted. For a person with memory loss, they have to work hard to do these things.
It isn't easy for the person or the care giver to deal with memory loss or someone with impaired memory.
I love the game shows, the ones where the audience can play along at home. There are the old TV game shows, which I like better than the re-boot new ones which I find too noisy, the old reruns such as "Password", and "Classic Concentration". "Match Game" with Gene Rayburn is comical plus the 6 guest stars us old timers can relate to, such as Eva Gabor, Charles Nelson Reilly, Fannie Flag, Brett Summers, Patty Duke, etc.
The newer game shows such as "The Floor" with Rob Lowe, and "The 1% Club" are really good to test one's knowledge ;) Also, "Wheel of Fortune". I also like "Price is Right" and "America Says" "Chain Reaction" "Common Knowledge" and "Master Minds" most of these are on the Games Show channel. Then there is "Jeopardy" if one is super smart :)
Mum had a stroke in 2011 and didn't recover because her husband couldn't bear to see her struggle when relearning how to do simple tasks, so he did everything for her - including speaking for her when she was slow to answer anyone. She needed more processing time, at first, but he continued (despite me asking him not to, and to let me talk to my mum) even when she, briefly, started to become herself again.
What saved Mum from becoming a virtual vegetable was that her husband started to put quiz shows on every afternoon - Eggheads, The Chase, The Weakest Link, etc. When Mum answered, it was a shock because she hadn't been allowed to do anything for herself and had shrunk inwards, rarely speaking. She'd also been diagnosed with vascular dementia.
Working out the visual puzzles on Catchphrase was also really good for her.
Not all, but certain puzzles can help with the connections in the brain, even though some connections have died.
I think it was doing puzzles and quizzes every day that slowed down the dementia. It was only this year, as Mum became more sick, that she started to show classic signs of dementia. By this point, Mum was slowly dying, and so was her brain.
I don't think, though, that anyone should derive much hope from this report alone. The amount of brain damage as well as the individual's baseline capacity for learning new things, or previous knowledge to recall, would all be factors, meaning that some people could be helped by puzzles more than others.
Also, there are other factors in how quickly dementia affects a person. In my mum's case, she had epilepsy and numerous TIAs, all of which are attacks on the brain. Then, there are other health issues which can affect the health of the brain, such as anything that affects nutrients and oxygen getting to the brain.
Keeping our brains active is important at all stages of our lives, but is often neglected as we age. I think we could all do ourselves a favour by stimulating and nourishing our brains now, not waiting until the damage is done.