Alzheimers Brain Development

It is generally accepted that, as people grow older, many functions across different domains show a decline, including cognition, memory, perception, executive function, and motor ability. Nonetheless, some aspects of cognition are maintained or improved with age, such as verbal knowledge (Grady, 2012). These age-related functional declines can cause great concerns of well-being and quality of life for a significant number of adults aged 65 or older. Meanwhile, these declines can signify the onset and development of Mild cognitive impairment (MCI), Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), or dementia. The increasing number of older people who are diagnosed with MCI, AD, or PD call for more effective interventions to reduce the influence
For many people, music training typically commences at an early age, when the brain is most sensitive to environmental input. Playing a musical instrument entails the acquisition and maintenance a wide range of skills, such as reading complex musical notes, coordinating hands and eyes movement, and memorizing long musical pieces. As a result, music training can boost one’s attention, memory, and executive functions. Previous research has demonstrated that intense musical training can result in plastic changes in the developing brain as well as the adult brain (Wan & Schlaug, 2010)
To investigate structural differences between the brains of adult musicians and non-musicians, Sluming, Barrick, Howard, Cezavirli, Mayes, & Roberts (2002) acquired brain images of male orchestral musicians and matched non-musicians. They found that musicians have greater gray matter in Broca’s area in the left inferior frontal gyrus compared to that of non-musicians. In addition, significant age-related volume reductions in cerebral hemispheres, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex subfields bilaterally and gray matter density in the left inferior frontal gyrus were observed in non-musicians but not musicians. It was concluded that playing an instrument could promote generation and retention of functionally relevant cortical tissue, and musicians appear to be less vulnerable to age-related brain atrophy, presumably because of their repetitive
Older adults in the training group had three months to learn and practice three-ball cascade juggling. Their brains were scanned at the start of the study, 3 months after the initial scan, another 3 months later when the jugglers ceased to practice. Although 60-year-olds were able to learn 3-ball cascade juggling, they are less proficiency in comparison to younger adults. Comparing to the older adults in the control group, older adults who were in the training group showed an increase in gray matter in the middle temporal area of the visual cortex, and this increase in gray matter in the same region was demonstrated in a previous cohort of 20-year-olds (Draganski, Gaser, Busch, Schuierer, Bogdahn, & May, 2004). In addition, only older adults in the training group, but not the control group, showed a transitory increase in gray matter in the hippocampus on the right side, along with the nucleus accumbens bilaterally. Interestingly, when older adults stopped practice juggling after 3 months, this increase of gray matter receded. This study suggests that alterations in gray matter volume not only occur in the developing brain, but also the aging brain. Given that the aging brain maintains its capacity to change its structure according