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Background: Recent studies have reported that sulforaphane (SFN) intake with cognitive training had positive effects on cognitive functions. However, it is still unknown whether SFN intake alone has beneficial effects on cognition as well as mood. We investigated whether a SFN intake intervention improved cognitive performance and mood states in healthy older adults. Methods: In a 12-week, double-blinded, randomized controlled trial (RCT), we randomly assigned 144 older adults to a SFN group or a placebo group. We asked the participants to take a supplement (SFN or placebo) for 12 weeks. We measured several cognitive functions, mood states, and biomarkers before and after the intervention period. Results: The SFN group showed improvement in processing speed and a decrease in negative mood compared to the placebo group. In addition, the SFN group exhibited a higher SFN-N-acetyl-L-cysteine (NAC) level compared to the placebo group. However, there were no significant results in other biomarkers of oxidant stress, inflammation, or neural plasticity. Discussion: These results indicate that nutrition interventions using SFN can have positive effects on cognitive functioning and mood in healthy older adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To find suggestions for a future definitive randomized control trial and examine the effects of physical exercise on neurocognition in schizophrenia. Design and Methods: Patients hospitalized with schizophrenia were randomly assigned to exercise (n = 5) or control (n = 17) groups. The experimental group performed an exercise regimen for 8 weeks. Following intervention, demographics, psychiatric symptoms, and neurocognitive functions were examined. Findings: The patients in the control and exercise groups, 14 and 4, respectively, showed significant differences in hospitalization duration and negative symptoms. After controlling both, neurocognition improved in the exercise group compared with the control group. Practice Implications: Mild‐intensity physical exercise improves global neurocognition in schizophrenic inpatients and could lead to earlier release. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: Physical and cognitive functions are mutually associated. However, it is unknown which markers of physical functions or body composition are most strongly associated with cognition. Here, we explored the association between body composition/physical performance and comprehensive neuropsychological assessments in an effort to identify reliable markers of cognition among factors in body composition/physical performance, including both usual and maximum gait speeds. Methods: We examined a total of 161 Japanese individuals (71 men, 90 women; aged 76.3 ± 7.2 years) with a Clinical Dementia Rating of 0.5 and a Mini‐Mental State Examination score >24. A battery of neuropsychological assessments, physical functional assessments and measurements of body composition was carried out. We conducted a multiple regression analysis to investigate the associations between cognitive performance and the factors in body composition and physical performance with adjustments for age, sex, and number of school years. Results: Maximum gait speed was the factor most widely associated with cognitive performance among the factors of body composition and physical performance. Conclusion: Maximum gait speed might be the best marker for cognition in this population of older individuals. Geriatr Gerontol Int 2018; 18: 1323–1329. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: To examine the relationship between cognitive function and unsafe driving acts among community‐dwelling older adults with cognitive impairments. Methods: Participants (n = 160) were older residents of Obu, Japan, aged ≥65 years with cognitive impairments. They regularly drove and were assessed for the number of unsafe driving acts without adequate verification during an on‐road test. We also evaluated cognitive function (attention, executive function and processing speed). Other examined variables included demographics, driving characteristics and visual condition. Results: Participants were classified into two groups according to the number of unsafe driving acts as follows: high group (≥4 unsafe driving acts) and low group (≤3 unsafe driving acts). The high group participants were older in age (P < 0.001) and obtained a lower score on the symbol digit substitution task (P = 0.002) than the low group. The number of unsafe driving acts showed modest significant positive correlations with age (r = 0.396, P < 0.001). The symbol digit substitution task score was significantly associated with the number of unsafe driving acts (β = −0.196, P < 0.05) after adjusting for age group. Conclusions: Processing speed was associated with unsafe driving acts that became worse with increasing age. Future study will be required to longitudinally examine the influence of processing speed on traffic accidents for those with cognitive impairments. Geriatr Gerontol Int 2018; 18: 847–852 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: A number of studies have reported that frailty is cross-sectionally associated with cognitive decline and is also a risk for future cognitive decline or dementia; however, there have been only a few studies that focus on the association between prefrailty and cognitive dysfunction. In the current study, we investigated the association between prefrailty and cognitionDesign: A cross-sectional study of the data obtained at registration in a randomized control trial.Setting: Toyota, Japan.Participants: Community-dwelling older subjects (male 54.6%) who had cognitive complaints.Measurements: A battery of neuropsychological and physical assessments were performed. Prefrailty was defined as exhibiting one or two of the five Fried criteria (weight loss, exhaustion, weakness, slow gait speed and low physical activity). We performed a multiple regression analysis to investigate the associations of cognitive performance with prefrailty, adjusting for the factors that were significantly different between the robust and prefrailty groups. To assess the cognitive attributes that were significantly associated with prefrailty, logistic analysis was performed to see if one specific criterion of the five frailty criteria was associated with cognitive performance.Results: The study subjects included 183 prefrail and 264 robust individuals. The prefrail subjects with cognitive complaints were older, less educated, more depressive, and more likely to have diabetes mellitus than the robust subjects. The prefrail subjects had lower performance in a wide-range of cognitive domains, and after adjustments for age, education, depressive mood, and diabetes mellitus, prefrailty was associated with a decline in delayed memory and processing speed. Among the components of the Fried criteria, slow gait speed and loss of activity were significantly associated with slow processing speed as assessed by the digit symbol substitution test.Conclusion: The current results demonstrated that prefrailty was associated with worse memory and processing speed performance, but not with other cognitive domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The Processing Speed Test (PST), a validated iPad®-based cognitive screening test for MS, has been applied to the cognitive assessment of Japanese MS patients using US normative data., Methods: To develop PST normative data from Japanese healthy volunteers and compare the PST score distribution between Japanese and US healthy volunteers, 254 healthy Japanese-speaking volunteers were enrolled and stratified by age (20-65 years). Potential participants with a Mini-Mental State Examination score < 27 were excluded. PST raw scores (total correct) were from the Japan cohort and compared with age-restricted US normative data and propensity score-matched data created by matching sex, age, and educational level from a published study of 428 healthy participants. PST score distributions and standardized z-scores were compared using t-test and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test statistics., Results: The mean age of the Japan cohort was 44.1 years. The PST scores of Japanese volunteers were significantly different from those of the age-restricted (mean ± SD 61.8 ± 10.1 vs 53.7 ± 10.8; p < 0.001) and the propensity score-matched US cohort (62.1 ± 10.1 vs 53.3 ± 10.6; p < 0.001)., Conclusion: Regression analyses centered on US normative data could underestimate disease severity in Japanese MS patients, suggesting that separate normative data should be considered for each population sample., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest MN has received consultant fees from Biogen; and travel and/or speaker honoraria from Biogen, Takeda, Mitsubishi Tanabe, Chugai, Alexion, and Novartis, YM has nothing to disclose, AA and ME were former employees of Biogen, NB, MK, IC, CdM, and JRW are employees of and may hold stock/stock options in Biogen, SMR has authored IP around the MS PATHS software; is a stockholder and scientific officer of Qr8 Health; and has received royalties and grant funding from Biogen, National MS Society, Department of Defense, and NIH., (Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Objective: Hazard perception (HP) is the ability to identify a hazardous situation while driving. Though HP has been well studied among neurologically intact populations, little is known about the HP of neurologically impaired populations (in this study, stroke patients). The purpose of this study is, first, to investigate the HP of stroke patients and, second, to verify the effect of lesion side (right or left hemisphere) on HP, from the viewpoint of hazard types. Methods: Sixty-seven neurologically intact age-matched older drivers and 63 stroke patients with valid driver's licenses conducted a video-based Japanese HP task. Participants were asked to indicate the hazardous events in the driving scenario. These events were classified into 3 types: (1) behavioral prediction hazards (BP), which are those where the cause is visible before it becomes a hazard; (2) environmental prediction hazards (EP), which are those where the ultimate hazard may be hidden from view; and (3) dividing and focusing attention hazards (DF), which are those where there is more than one potential hazard to monitor on approach．Participants also took part in the Trail Making Test (TMT) to evaluate visual information processing speed. Results: The results showed that the number of responses was significantly fewer for stroke patients than for age-matched drivers for all hazard types ( P < .001), and this difference was not affected by lesion side ( P > .05). It was also found that stroke patients showed a slower response time than age-matched drivers only for BP ( P < .001). The lesion side did not affect response latency ( P > .05). Results of the TMT revealed that age-matched drivers completed the task significantly faster than stroke patients ( P < .001) and that neither TMT-A nor TMT-B differentiated between patients with left hemisphere damage and patients with right hemisphere damage ( P > .05). Conclusions: Firstly, HP in stroke patients is low compared to age-matched drivers. Secondly, even if stroke patients notice hazards, their response may be delayed in a BP situation, due to a slower visual information processing speed. Thirdly, the lesion side does not appear to affect HP.