UT Dallas Study: Brain Health Improves at Any Age
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- University of Texas at Dallas researchers published a three-year study in Scientific Reports tracking 3,966 adults ages 19 to 94, finding that brain health can improve at any age, including among participants in their 80s and 90s.
- Participants spent just 5 to 15 minutes per day on brain-training activities, and researchers measured changes using the patent-pending BrainHealth Index (BHI), which combines roughly 20 metrics — including the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index and the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire — across clarity, emotional balance, and connectedness.
- The study found that those who started with the lowest BrainHealth Index scores experienced the largest improvements, while engagement — not age, gender, or education level — was the strongest predictor of positive change.
- Lori Cook, CBH director of clinical research and the study's corresponding author, said the findings "challenge the prevailing narrative of inevitable cognitive decline," adding that measurable growth was seen even among high performers entering the study.
- Sandra Bond Chapman, senior author and CBH chief director, said the research counters "the outdated notion that we need to wait until something bad happens to our brains before we do anything for them."
- The study population was largely white, female, and college-educated — a limitation Cook acknowledged, saying the team is working to increase representation before generalizing the findings to underrepresented communities.
- The BrainHealth Project, launched by CBH in 2020, continues long-term data collection, with approximately 400 Dallas-area participants undergoing more than 1,200 brain scans at the Sammons BrainHealth Imaging Center.
Why it matters: For the 3,966 participants and the broader public, the study inverts the long-standing assumption that cognitive decline is inevitable in later life, and ties improvement to a low-friction intervention of just 5 to 15 minutes daily. The findings rest on a sample that skews white, female, and college-educated — a limitation the researchers flag, meaning the results can't yet be generalized to underrepresented groups.
