Digital technology helps prevent dementia among the elderly, not cause it, study suggests

It started with a secondary school typing course. Wanda Woods enrolled because her father advised her that typing proficiency would lead to jobs. Sure enough, the United States’ federal Environmental Protection Agency hired her as an after-school worker while she was still a junior. Her supervisor “sat me down and put me on a machine called a word processor”, Woods, now 67, recalled. “It was big and bulky and used magnetic cards to store information. I thought, ‘I kinda like this.’” Decades later, she was still liking it. In 2012 – the first year that more than half of Americans 65 and older were internet users – she started a computer training business. Now she is an instructor with Senior Planet in Denver, Colorado, an effort supported by AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons) to help older people learn and stay abreast of technology. Woods has no plans to retire. Staying involved with tech “keeps me in the know, too”, she says. Some neuroscientists researching the effects of technology on older adults are inclined to agree. The first cohort of seniors to have contended – not always enthusiastically – with a digital society has reached the age when cognitive impairment becomes more common. Given decades of alarms about technology’s threats to our brains and well-being – sometimes called “digital dementia” – one might expect to start seeing negative effects. The opposite appears true. “Among the digital pioneer generation, use of everyday digital technology has been associated with reduced risk of cognitive impairment and dementia,” said Michael Scullin, a cognitive neuroscientist at Baylor University in the US state of Texas. It is almost akin to hearing from a nutritionist that bacon is good for you. “It flips the script that technology is always bad,” said Murali Doraiswamy, director of the neurocognitive disorders programme at Duke University in the US state of North Carolina, who was not involved with the study. “It’s refreshing and provocative and poses a hypothesis that deserves further research.” Scullin and Jared Benge, a neuropsychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, were co-authors of a recent analysis investigating the effects of technology use on people over 50, with an average age of 69. They found that those who used computers, smartphones, the internet or a mix did better on cognitive tests, with lower rates of cognitive impairment or dementia diagnoses than those who avoided technology or used it less often. “Normally, you see a lot of variability across studies,” Scullin said. But in this analysis of 57 studies involving more than 411,000 seniors, published in Nature Human Behaviour, almost 90 per cent of the studies found that technology had a protective cognitive effect. Much of the apprehension about technology and cognition arises from research on children, sometimes focused on adolescents, whose brains are still developing. “There’s pretty compelling data that difficulties can emerge with attention or mental health or behavioural problems” when young people are overexposed to screens and digital devices, Scullin said. Older adults’ brains are also malleable, but less so. And those who began grappling with technology in midlife had already learned “foundational abilities and skills”, Scullin said. Then, to take part in a swiftly evolving society, they had to learn a whole lot more. Years of online brain-training experiments lasting a few weeks or months have produced varying results. Often, they improve a person’s ability to perform the task in question without enhancing other skills. “I tend to be pretty sceptical [of their benefit],” said Walter Boot, a psychologist at the Centre on Ageing and Behavioural Research at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. “Cognition is really hard to change.” The new analysis, however, reflects “technology use in the wild”, he said, with adults “having to adapt to a rapidly changing technological environment” over several decades. He found the study’s conclusions “plausible”. Analyses like this cannot determine causality. Does technology improve older people’s cognition, or do people with low cognitive ability avoid technology? Is tech adoption just a proxy for enough wealth to buy a laptop? “We still don’t know if it’s chicken or egg,” Doraiswamy said. Yet when Scullin and Benge accounted for health, education, socioeconomic status and other demographic variables, they still found significantly higher cognitive ability among older digital technology users. What might explain the apparent connection? “These devices represent complex new challenges,” Scullin said. “If you don’t give up on them, if you push through the frustration, you’re engaging in the same challenges that studies have shown to be cognitively beneficial.” Even handling the constant updates, the troubleshooting and the sometimes maddening new operating systems might prove advantageous. “Having to relearn something is another positive mental challenge,” Scullin said. Digital technology may also protect brain health by fostering social connections, known to help stave off cognitive decline. Or its reminders and prompts could partially compensate for memory loss, as Scullin and Benge found in a smartphone study, while apps help preserve functional abilities like shopping and banking. Numerous studies have shown that while the number of people with dementia is increasing as the population ages, the proportion of older adults who develop dementia has been falling in the United States and several European countries. Researchers have attributed the decline to a variety of factors, including reduced smoking, higher education levels and better blood pressure treatments. Possibly, Doraiswamy said, engaging with technology has been part of the pattern. Of course, digital technologies present risks, too. Online fraud and scams often target older adults, and while they are less apt to report fraud losses than younger people, the amounts they lose are much higher, according to the US Federal Trade Commission. Disinformation poses its own hazards. And as with users of any age, more is not necessarily better. “If you’re bingeing Netflix 10 hours a day, you may lose social connections,” Doraiswamy said. Technology, he noted, cannot “substitute for other brain-healthy activities” like exercising and eating sensibly. An unanswered question: will this supposed benefit extend to subsequent generations, digital natives more comfortable with the technology their grandparents often laboured over? “The technology is not static – it still changes,” Boot said. “So maybe it’s not a one-time effect.” Still, the change that tech has wrought “follows a pattern”, he added. “A new technology gets introduced, and there’s a kind of panic.” From television and video games to the latest and perhaps scariest development – artificial intelligence – “a lot of it is an overblown initial reaction”, he said. “Then, over time, we see it’s not so bad and may actually have benefits.” Like most people her age, Woods grew up in an analogue world of paper cheques and maps. But as she moved from one employer to another through the ’80s and ’90s, she progressed to IBM desktops and mastered Lotus 1-2-3 and Windows 3.1. Along the way, her personal life turned digital, too: a home desktop when her sons needed one for school, a mobile phone after she and her husband could not summon help for a roadside flat tyre, a smartwatch to track her steps. These days, Woods pays bills and shops online, uses a digital calendar, and group-texts her relatives. And she seems unafraid of AI, the most earthshaking new tech. Last year, she turned to AI chatbots like Google Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to plan an excursion to South Carolina in a recreational vehicle. Now, she is using them to arrange a family cruise celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary. Like what you read? Follow SCMP Lifestyle on Facebook, X and Instagram. You can also sign up for our eNewsletter here.

Digital technology helps prevent dementia among the elderly, not cause it, study suggests

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}US researchers find that older adults who use computers, smartphones and the internet have lower rates of cognitive impairment

US researchers find that older adults who use computers, smartphones and the internet have lower rates of cognitive impairment