Using Your Brain At Work Works To Retain Its Function

"High cognitive stimulation jobs included senior government officers, other specialist managers, production and operations managers, social science and related professionals, directors and chief executives, and health professionals [excluding nurses]."

"Occupations with low cognitive stimulation were booking clerks, cashiers, agricultural, fishery and related labourers, transport labourers, mobile-plant operators, motor vehicle drivers, metal moulders, welders, sheet-metal workers, structural metal preparers, and related trades workers, textile-, fur- and leather-products machine operators."

“The levels of dementia at age 80 seen in people who experienced high levels of mental stimulation was observed at age 78.3 in those who had experienced low mental stimulation. This suggests the average delay in disease onset is about one and half years, but there is probably considerable variation in the effect between people."

Professor Mike Kivimaki,  University College London’s Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care

 

"This multicohort study of more than 100,000 participants suggests that people with cognitively stimulating jobs have a lower risk of dementia in old age than those with non-stimulating jobs."

"The findings that cognitive stimulation is associated with lower levels of plasma proteins that potentially inhibit axonogenesis and synaptogenesis and increase the risk of dementia might provide clues to underlying biological mechanisms."

Mega-study, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) August 2021 

New research suggests that jobs that involve a lot of working with others, negotiating or mentoring are good for your brain's health. AP Photo/ Steve Ruark/File

"This new work is an important reminder to all in the specialty of dementia prevention that we can only go so far with intervention studies that are short, late, small, and include only people who are heterogenous in their risk profiles to reveal any benefit of mental enrichment on dementia risk."
"Carefully designed, large, population-based studies with long periods of follow-up that also aim to provide biological clues, can be an important addition to randomized controlled trials. Kivimäki and colleagues’ study is an outstanding example."

Serhiy Dekhtyar, Karolinska Institutet

 

"The general view has been that physical activity normally reduces the risk of dementia, just as another study from the University of Copenhagen recently showed that a healthy lifestyle can reduce the risk of developing dementia conditions by half."

"Here the form of physical activity is vital, though, says associate professor Kirsten Nabe-Nielsen from the Department of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen."

"Before the study we assumed that hard physical work was associated with a higher risk of dementia. It is something other studies have tried to prove, but ours is the first to connect the two things convincingly," says Kirsten Nabe-Nielsen, who has headed the study together with the National Research Centre for the Working Environment with help from Bispebjerg-Frederiksberg Hospital."

"For example, the WHO guide to preventing dementia and disease on the whole mentions physical activity as an important factor. But our study suggests that it must be a 'good' form of physical activity, which hard physical work is not. Guides from the health authorities should therefore differentiate between physical activity in your spare time and physical activity at work, as there is reason to believe that the two forms of physical activity have opposite effects," Kirsten Nabe-Nielsen says and explains that even when you take smoking, blood pressure, overweight, alcohol intake and physical activity in one's spare time into account, hard physical work is associated with an increased occurrence of dementia."

Science News, October 2020

Previously, research found that keeping one's brain active well into later life is the essential ingredient required  to fend off the cognitive decline that leads to dementia. Now, a new study has concluded that those with a mentally stimulating profession or work benefit by up to 25 percent over people whose cerebral power fails to be challenged in their workplace. This is an area of research that appears to have been under-researched in the past in studies on the decline of mental abilities.

Researchers involved in the study collected data on over 100,000 people who had participated in 13 different studies worldwide, with participants asked to rate how mentally stimulating they found their job to be, when the study began. The study then went on to track participants for an average of 17 years to determine whether any of them eventually developed dementia.

In people with active, stimulating jobs dementia was found to be 23 percent less common than their counterparts who worked in brain-passive professions, by the tracking researchers. Who determined that the incidence of dementia among those with a mentally taxing job turned out to be 4.8 per 10,000 person-years. While for the low-mental stimulation group, the level per 10,000 person years was 7.3.

Since it can take decades, adding up to tens of thousands of hours, the accumulated effect of cognitive workplace stimulation was seen to last "considerably longer" than any efforts undertaken with respect to cognitive interventions or exposure to cognitively stimulating hobbies. Workplace-cognitive-stimulation is more enduring, in other words than later efforts to compensate for lack of it.

Further adjustments were undertaken in recognition of a range of established dementia risk factors in childhood and adulthood, and taking into account potentially influential factors such as age, sex, educational levels and lifestyle. No differences were found between genders, or participants younger or older than 60. What was found however, was that the associative impact was more notable for Alzheimer's disease than for other types of dementia.

Scientists looked at more than 100,000 participants across studies from the UK, Europe and the US focused on links between work-related factors and chronic disease, disability and mortality. Photograph: Alamy

"This large, robust study adds to a body of evidence suggesting that staying mentally active is important for helping reduce the risk of dementia."

"Previous research has suggested that keeping the brain active can help build cognitive reserve, a type of resilience that helps the brain ‘rewire’ its connections more easily and keep working for longer when diseases like Alzheimer’s take hold."

"This new research also identified proteins in people’s blood plasma that may be connected to this process, and further research should investigate this finding in more detail."

"Not everyone is able to choose the type of work they do, but studies like this highlight the importance of finding activities that help keep the brain active, whether it’s through work or hobbies."

Dr Sara Imarisio, head of research, Alzheimer’s Research UK