NCT03661190

Online Grammatical Reasoning Training for Older Adults

Impact of Short-term Intensive Online Grammatical Reasoning Training on Cognition and Function in Adults Over 50: An Online Randomised Controlled Trial

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 7,240 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Exeter · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 50 Years – 100 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The START study will investigate the impact of playing a Grammatical Reasoning brain training task on overall brain function (cognition) and day-to-day function in people over 50. The study builds on existing work that has shown very promising results with brain training approaches in older adults. There is good evidence that playing brain training games leads to improvements in brain functions including memory and reasoning. There is also a suggestion that regular involvement in brain training games might help reduce the risk of cognitive decline and dementia later in life. It appears that reasoning, or problem-solving, is particularly important as it is one of the first abilities to decline with age. This study will use this evidence to target reasoning in a specific brain training task. It will also explore the potential role of genetic factors in how people perform in the task. The study will compare the impact of a Grammatical Reasoning Task (START) with a control task consisting of simple picture-matching. Over 7000 participants will be randomly allocated to either START or the control and will be asked to play the task as often as they wish for a period of six weeks. Both tasks will be delivered entirely online so people will access the study from home on their computers. This will be achieved through our dedicated online research platform, PROTECT, which hosts a cohort of over 20,000 older adults who have provided DNA samples as part of a longitudinal study. This study will measure the impact of the training on cognition and Instrumental Activities of Daily Living. Assessments will be completed online at baseline, two/six weeks and six months. Overall, this study aims to generate exciting new data about how brain training could be included in guidance on healthy ageing.

Conditions

• Healthy Aging

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Grammatical Reasoning	START measures the ability to determine the relationships among different shape combinations which are assigned to grammatical statements about them which can be either correct or incorrect. It is a measure of attention, working memory and executive control.
OTHER	Card Pairs	A basic picture-matching task.

Timeline

• Start date: 2017-03-31
• Primary completion: 2018-05-31
• Completion: 2018-11-30
• First posted: 2018-09-07
• Last updated: 2019-04-17

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United Kingdom