The more you make your brain work during your workday, the less likely you are to have memory problems in the future. At least that is what emerges from a study carried out in Norway and published a few days ago in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, which has followed 7,000 people from the age of 30 until they retired in their sixties. of 305 different occupations, to analyze the relationship between cognitive stimulation while working and cognitive decline at advanced ages.
Specifically, the researchers divided the study participants into four groups based on the type of work they performed and the degree of mental effort required by the set of skills required depending on whether they were routine manual tasks, routine cognitive, non-routine analytical and non-routine interpersonal.
Manual tasks, the study authors explain, require speed, control over the equipment and often involve repetitive movements, as would be the case when working in a factory. Routine cognitive tasks require precision and accuracy in repetitive tasks, and a good example would be accounting and filing jobs.
Non-routine analytical tasks are those that involve analyzing information, using creative thinking, and interpreting information for others. And non-routine interpersonal tasks refer to establishing and maintaining personal relationships, motivating or training others. Examples of non-routine cognitive jobs would be both public relations and computer programming.
However, the most common job among the group of participants with the highest cognitive demands was teaching, while in the group with the lowest demands on mental effort the most numerous were postman and janitor.
Once they turned 70, the study participants underwent memory and reasoning tests to assess whether they had any type of impairment. Among those who had performed tasks with less mental demands, 42% were diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, compared to 27% in the group who had had more cognitively demanding jobs.
And after adjusting for other factors such as age, sex, education, income and lifestyle, the researchers estimated that the group that had made the least effort on their brain to perform at work had a 66% greater risk of suffering from memory problems or dementia. milder than those who had challenged their mind more during the work stage.
“We examined the demands of several jobs and found that cognitive stimulation during your 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s is related to a lower risk of mild cognitive impairment after age 70; that is, having a job that requires complex thinking is a possible way to maintain memory and reasoning in old age,” said Trine Holt Edwin, author of the study, presenting the results.
And he stressed that both training and brain-challenging work throughout one’s career play a crucial role in reducing the risk of cognitive decline in the future. However, Edwin believes that further research is needed to identify which specific cognitively challenging tasks are most beneficial for maintaining memory and reasoning.
