Fight depression elderly subjects with video games?
Intellectual stimulation through computer games could in some older people with severe depression, do as well or better than drugs as a study published in the journal Nature Communications suggests.
Depression affects many elderly and if psychotherapy and antidepressants conventional medication are effective for some, for many, these treatments have little effect on the disease, say the authors of a paper in Nature Communications highlighting the need for treatment more active in geriatrics. "Antidepressant medications are often slow to act and often incomplete and unstable results. Remissions occur only in one third of patients," they write.
These Americans and Chinese experts have created computerized cognitive training programs and tested in eleven individuals of 60-89 years, resistant to treatment, to improve their learning skills and memory. They compared their results with those obtained in another study of 33 adults treated with the antidepressant major reference, escitalopram (brand names: Seroplex, Cipralex or Lexapro), instead of computer-assisted therapy.
Depressions healed in 4 weeks
The results suggest that these brain training exercises were equally effective in reducing symptoms of depression escitalopram, faster: in four weeks instead of two, according to the authors. "72% [of patients] had a complete remission of depression," says Sarah Morimoto Geriatric Psychiatric Institute in New York, co-author of the study. A full clinical study with a larger number of patients would be needed to confirm these findings, the researchers admit, but hope that their study will stimulate more research on alternative therapies for depression resulted.
Programs were developed to test the theory that brain aging can be fought through intense practice of this type of game, to recover the function of learning and memory loss and improve decision-making in order to improve the state of depression. Previous research has shown that low levels of certain intellectual functions also led to a poor response to antidepressants.
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