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?
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!
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.
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.
Games are often very good at diverting the person's attention away from a dementia-loop (if they're in one) and are repeating incessantly or compusively obsessing over nothing. Games also help to keep the person with dementia occupied. When they have something to do this cuts back on the anxiety and panicking over nothing. If a person with dementia isn't all worked up and freaking out, it's easier for everyone including them, to get their care done.
A person with Alzheimer's/dementia (depending on how far gone they are) is usually like having a very unpleasant, adult-sized toddler. When the child/toddler is having a tantrum and you give them something that captures their attention like a toy or a game, this often puts the brakes on the tantrum because they're more interested in what you're giving them then they are at carrying on.
Games and puzzles are a good distraction. They don't fight anything except boredom.
I was told that what is good is exercising both sides of the brain. If righthanded, try to use your left hand. Like when brushing your teeth, change hands. Doing the same thing over and over does not challenge the brain, learning new things does.
IMO ALZ is hereditary. It runs on my Dads side. Ome of the others are caused by lifestyle.
"...the left brain is more verbal, analytical, and orderly than the right brain. It's sometimes called the digital brain because it's better at things like reading, writing, and computations. On the other hand, the right brain is more visual, intuitive, and creative."
source: https://www.healthline.com/health/left-brain-vs-right-brain#:~:text=This%20suggests%20that%20the%20left,visual%2C%20intuitive%2C%20and%20creative.
The point is not about "handedness" but different functions on each side. Eg: an left-brained engineer takes an art class rather than a math class, and a right-brained artist takes a physics class, etc. It means exercising the different parts of our brains that are not our "dominant" side.
Fitness and activity are important to maintaining brain function.
Healthy diet is also key (low to no sugars, less alcohol etc)
Playing card games or leaning new card games where you interact with people is another suggestion.
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 :)
Conclusion:
Serious games have an important place in dementia care and plenty of related studies are presented. Various kinds of games can be applied into dementia care, namely board games, video games, virtual reality games. Also, a broad range of techniques are used to develop games, among which are Somatosensory technology, 3D graphics generation technology, sensor technology and so on. However, serious games are no panacea for dementia care. Since they are more effective in treating early-stage and middle-stage dementia while more futile faced with late-stage dementia. Likewise, the research on SGDC mainly focuses on the treatment of early-stage or middle-stage dementia. Besides, although there are abundant research results, a unified category and the standard assessment model of therapeutic effectiveness both are not available for SGDC. Considering these challenges, the following directions are worth to be further developed.
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More therapies, like music therapy, reminiscence therapy, can be integrated with serious games to improve effectiveness of games therapy and provide more new ideas for the design of serious games.
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A Serious Games Hospital for dementia care can be established to offer systematic and professional treatment for patients with dementia. For instance, different departments can be set according to different symptoms in Serious Game Hospital.
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To give an explicit guideline for researchers, clear category architecture should be presented. For example, the category can be based on different symptoms, such as mild, moderate or severe cognitive impairments along with some integrated symptoms.
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To choose effective serious games for patients, the professional assessment model deserves further study. Researchers can pay more attention to multi-group participation (e.g. patients, professionals, etc.) and multi-method combination (e.g. questionnaire tests, physiological signals, etc.).
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For some common video games, patients can play on their own at home. Whereas, for some VR games with expensive equipment, most patients can not play at home by themselves. In the face of this situation, the hospital can equip the community with relevant resources, which not only allows more patients to obtain abundant medical resources but also reduces the burden on the hospital. Moreover, this also requires the government to make relevant public interest policies to support.
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SGDC is a cross-field of computer science and medical science. In the development of SGDC, game designers and medical researchers need to maintain frequent and close communication, which can design interesting and effective serious games. In addition, the cultivation of talents must be promoted at the intersections of computer science and medical science.
As an effective treatment for dementia, SGDC is intensively studied. However, with the long-term study, there is no systematic review of the development stage for SGDC. To fill this gap, we investigate the development route of SGDC and divided its development into 3 stages: board games stage, video games stage and VR games stage, which can help researchers to better understand its development quickly. Apart from that, we found that a unified category framework of SGDC is still unavailable to regulate its development. Considering this, we analyze characteristics of dementia symptoms of different stages and present a category of SGDC based on it to encourage developers to design more symptom-targeted serious games. What’s more, it is essential for an effective treatment that reliable assessment methods should be formulated. Given that, we review existing assessment methods and present an assessment model with multi-group participation and multi-method combination which is more comprehensive than those existing methods. Finally, we discuss the present SGDC and its challenges and put forward 6 d
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.