WASHINGTON: Playing games and solving puzzles may help prevent Alzheimer’s disease, but getting a good education may help your brain overcome its effects, US researchers said on Monday.

Higher learning may help the brain become more elastic — either giving a person a reserve of brain cells to call on when Alzheimer’s strikes, or perhaps helping the brain re-wire itself to bypass the rotted-out parts, they said.

The study of 130 nuns, priests and monks with Alzheimer’s showed large differences in real-world functioning of those who had more education. Each volunteer took a test of cognitive function — awareness, reasoning and judgment — about eight months on average before dying.

After death, their brains were examined and analyzed.

Those who had more education seemed to have been affected less by the plaques — the characteristic blobs of dead brain cells — that are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s, the scientists report in Tuesday’s issue of the journal Neurology.

Usually, the more plaques a person with Alzheimer’s has, the less well he or she functions. But education offset this effect, Dr David Bennett of Rush Presbyterian-St Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago and colleagues there and at the University of Pennsylvania found.

Education “may make the brain more adaptable and flexible, similar to what we have seen demonstrated in experimental animals,” Bennett said in a statement.

Neil Buckholtz, dementia expert at the National Institute on Aging, said education may help the brain build up a savings account of extra brainpower.

“This idea of cognitive reserve is something that has been around for a while,” Buckholtz said in a telephone interview.

“It suggests that what is happening is through education, somehow ... more connections are formed in the brain or something else happens that gives us this ability to fight against the effects of these plaques.”

Buckholtz said the findings were especially surprising because the Catholic clergy who took part in the study nearly all had some level of higher education. He said more studies may show whether people who lack high school diplomas, for example, suffer greater effects from Alzheimer’s.

Several recent studies have supported the old saying that the brain is a “muscle” that benefits from being used.

Just last week a team at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York reported that elderly people who frequently read, do crossword puzzles, practice a musical instrument or play board games cut their risk of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia by nearly two-thirds compared to people who seldom take part in such activities.

Health officials are bracing for a huge increase in Alzheimer’s as US baby-boomers age. Currently more than four million Americans have Alzheimer’s, which is always fatal and for which there is no cure.—Reuters