Growing interest in brain health, combined with efforts by employers and insurers to keep down health care costs, has the fledgling discipline poised for takeoff.
Consumers and retirement homes have turned brain-fitness games and exercises into commercial hits, and now some insurers and employers are incorporating them into wellness programs that promote health for the mind as well as the body.
The U.S. market in brain-fitness software generated $265 million in revenue in 2008, an 18% increase from $225 million in 2007 and up from $100 million in 2005, according to a report this month by SharpBrains, a San Francisco company that tracks the cognitive-fitness industry.
Sales have been driven mostly by retirement homes, more than 700 of which now offer computerized cognitive-training programs, and by consumers doing programs on their home computers or visiting brain "gyms," said Alvaro Fernandez, a co-founder of SharpBrains and its CEO.
Approximately 10 million baby boomers will develop Alzheimer's disease, and many more will experience mild cognitive impairment, an early stage of memory loss that may indicate the development of Alzheimer's, according to the Alzheimer's Association. The combined health cost impact could top $100 billion.
"It's a major health care crisis that has the medical world looking down the barrel of a gun," Michel said.
Still, it remains unclear whether brain games really do improve cognitive health.
"The best you can say is that they are not going to do harm, and they might do some good," Lah said. "But it's going to take years and decades to study the differences between people who participated in these activities and those who didn't." ***
***Dr. James Lah, an associate professor of neurology at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.
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