Chess and Alzheimer's

ChessNinja.com
By Mig

In an interview with the local León paper, event organizer (since 1997) Marcelino Sión relates a conversation with Leontxo Garcia about chess as a means of combating Alzheimer's Disease. (Garcia has long promoted the benefits of chess in this area.) There are various studies about the effects of various cognitive pastimes -- crossword puzzles, sudoku, etc -- delaying the onset of Alzheimer's and other types of aphasia and deterioration of mental faculties. Sión relates Leontxo's question and I'll pass it on to you: Have you ever known of a strong chessplayer with Alzheimer's?

I haven't, and I would extend that not only to strong players but also to weak-but-dedicated amateurs who continued playing regularly deeply into their senior years. Surely that's a better test of the theory anyway. On the other hand, Miguel Najdorf, who was very strong well into his 70s, and quite clear-headed if rather cantankerous, was told by his doctors to stop playing speed chess because it was rough on his weak heart. Another plus for classical chess!

David Shenk's book "The Immortal Game" discussed this topic and he was interviewed about it on ABC News a few years ago. Video here, ChessBase article on it here. You can get more googling.

32 Comments
dmcw | June 5, 2009 4:58 AM | Reply
You cannot rule out the possibility that those who start developing dementia as they get older will stop playing chess. So the aged population of amateur chess players without dementia may be self-selected to be resistant. I think this is known as the "healthy worker effect".

Perhaps the Gandmaster anecdote is better. This obviously suffers from a smaller sample size and none of them will have "normal" brains, but they are selected at an early age when pre-dementia changes should not have happened.

I will not say too much, as I have not read any of the literature about this and so may be barking up the wrong tree.

Dan

chess and Alzheimer's

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