The Alzheimer’s Association International Conference met in London this July, and for the first time in years, the standout stories weren’t about drugs.
The headline result came from LATAM FINGERS, an 11-nation South American trial replicating the original Finnish FINGER study, published simultaneously in The Lancet. Older adults following a structured programme of brain exercise, physical activity, and diet showed a 55% greater improvement in global cognition than a comparison group given the same advice with less structure. The brain exercise element throughout was BrainHQ, the same platform underpinning ENHANCE. Encouragingly, researchers noted the gains were strongest in participants who started with lower cognitive scores and less formal education, suggesting these interventions may help most where they’re needed most, not just those already primed to benefit.
Also presented at the conference: initial results from the ENACT study, which measured a blood biomarker for amyloid, the protein whose buildup defines Alzheimer’s disease at a biological level. Participants training with BrainHQ showed a significant improvement in their amyloid blood test results compared with a control group using ordinary computer games, suggesting the training may influence the biological processes underlying the disease, not just its symptoms. The effect held for men but not women in this dataset, which researchers attribute to either sample size or genuine biological differences in how amyloid behaves, an open question worth watching rather than a settled one.
Why this matters alongside what came before
Taken on its own, ENACT is an early, single finding. Read alongside two things that came before it, it starts to look like a pattern.
Last October, the INHANCE study found that BrainHQ training increased production of acetylcholine, a brain chemical that declines with age and drops sharply with Alzheimer’s, described as the first time this had been demonstrated for any intervention.
In February, a 20-year follow-up to the ACTIVE study, the same research programme’s speed-training exercise now built into ENHANCE, found a 25% reduction in Alzheimer’s and related dementia diagnoses among participants, again a first for any pill, programme, or practice.
Put together: a real-world cognitive outcome (ACTIVE), a plausible biological mechanism (INHANCE), and now early evidence of change in a clinical biomarker (ENACT). None of these findings is definitive on its own, and the ENACT results in particular are early and should be read that way. But it’s a coherent, converging picture, and one we think is genuinely worth sharing with our audience rather than sitting on until every study is finalised.
We didn’t run these studies. BrainHQ and the wider research community did, and we’d encourage you to read their own reporting directly: ENACT and the amyloid findings and the fuller AAIC London round-up. It’s the same evidence base ENHANCE draws on, and it’s moving fast enough that we expect to be writing about it again before long.
Most school leaders are on annual leave this week. The Department for Education picked exactly that moment to publish three documents that will shape how every mainstream school in England spends its inclusion budget for the next three years.
The Alzheimer’s Association International Conference met in London this July, and for the first time in years, the standout stories weren’t about drugs.
We’re about to begin work in several new prisons and it’s prompted us to write down something we don’t say often enough publicly: the difference between a programme that survives its first six months and one that doesn’t rarely comes down to the content.
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