The Sars-Cov-2 Pandemic and the Brave New Digital World of Environmental Enrichment to Prevent Brain Aging and Cognitive
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The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease - JPAD
© Serdi and Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
The Sars-Cov-2 Pandemic and the Brave New Digital World of Environmental Enrichment to Prevent Brain Aging and Cognitive Decline H. Hampel1, A. Vergallo1 Eisai Inc., Neurology Business Group, Woodcliff Lake, NJ, USA Corresponding Author: Harald Hampel and Andrea Vergallo, Eisai Inc., Neurology Business Group, 100 Tice Blvd, Woodcliff Lake, NJ 07677, USA, Tel: (+1) 201-746-2060 (o) [email protected]; [email protected] J Prev Alz Dis Published online July 13, 2020, http://dx.doi.org/10.14283/jpad.2020.39
Abstract
Individuals experiencing brain aging, cognitive decline, and dementia are currently confronted with several more complex challenges due to the current Sars-Cov-2 pandemic as compared to younger and cognitively healthy people. During the first six months of the pandemic, we are experiencing critical issues related to the management of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia. The evolving, highly contagious global viral spread has created a pressure test of unprecedented proportions for the existing brain health care infrastructure and related services for management, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. Social distancing and lock-down measures are catalyzing and accelerating a technological paradigm shift, away from a traditional model of brain healthcare focused on late symptomatic disease stages and towards optimized preventive strategies to slow brain aging and increase resilience at preclinical asymptomatic stages. Digital technologies transform global healthcare for accessible equality of opportunities in order to generate better outcomes for brain aging aligned with the paradigm of preventive medicine. Key words: Brain aging, Alzheimer’s disease, enviromental enrichment, social distancing.
Introduction
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tudies using experimental models of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) indicate that multi-sensory cognitive stimulation, framed as “environmental enrichment”, is associated with transient improvement and a long-lasting slowed decline of spatial memory as well as reduced accumulation of cerebral amyloid (1, 2). Some studies further suggest that an enriched environment can induce (epi)genetic changes that support hippocampal neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity (3). Overall, cognitive stimulation shows promising potential as a viable neuroprotective strategy for the early preclinical asymptomatic stages of AD (4). Morever, environmental enrichment has the potential to increase brain resilience to stress and support compensatory capacity to incipient pathophysiological mechanisms in a time-related fashion (5–7). It is well
Received June 10, 2020 Accepted for publication June 19, 2020
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established that human face-to-face interaction and different patterns of social stimuli significantly contribute to cognitive reserve (8), in healthy aging individuals as well as in patients with mild cognitive impairment and dementia (8, 9). On the other hand, large-scale human studies showed that an
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