Game Therapy: Alzheimer's treatment

Positive effects of Gaming on a cognitive and psychological level - Part 2 Alzheimer's treatment with games

Before I get started with this I would like to bring your attention to a study from the University of Montreal I will be referencing heavily:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0187779

I highly recommend having a read if you find this interesting they go into far more detail in the scientific journal than I ever could.

So to quickly go over the study and what they found. The test was to take elderly people from a few different age groups and have them play Super Mario 64 over several sessions for an extended period of time. The findings were not overly dramatic but they were conclusive, all of the participants (admittedly to different extents) saw an increase in their Hippocampal grey matter which is the main area affected by Alzheimer's

As for why this improvement occurred I am going to provide a quote as I don't believe I could put it better than they have:

"How does 3D-platform training promote increased hippocampal grey matter in older adults? We hypothesize that the design of 3D-platform video games bias people towards hippocampus-dependent spatial learning. This is achieved through the building of relationships between landmarks in the virtual environment to create a cognitive map. For example, learning the relationships between landmarks (e.g., buildings, trees, rivers etc.) results in the flexible use of environmental information to navigate to a given destination point from any position in the environment. The encoding and retrieval of spatial memory from an internal cognitive map relies centrally on the hippocampus"

Now something important to take note of here is that just playing any game at all would not necessarily provide an improvement in Hippocampal matter, It is specifically the fact the Mario 64 engages you in creating and recalling a "cognitive map" that allows this treatment to work.

This is not to say that games that do not force you to do this have no value as cognitive treatPments just that they will likely do less to affect the Hippocampus in particular.

So far i'm sure all of this sounds very positive, however during the course of this study they did run into one major problem. Attrition, the number of participants dropping out of the study was comparably high when put next to another type of experimental Alzheimer's treatment, for example music therapy where participants are taught to play an instrument.
The study hypothesises that this is an issue of the elderly's perspective on the relative value of playing video games (Generally perceived to be pointless and unproductive) compared to learning an instrument (Perceived to be a valuable creative outlet and worthy of praise.)

So in conclusion If we want to see these effective therapies see more widespread adoption we are not only presented with the standard array of obstacles that come with introducing any kind of new treatment or therapy, but also the issue of perception of video games as a cultural phenomenon which actively and unfairly prevented many of these Alzheimer's victims from getting the full benefit they potentially could have from this study. And will continue to stand in the way of both the already proven techniques showcased in this study and many others, but perhaps more importantly the treatments of the future that we have yet to discover.