Recent research published in scientific report suggests that by using accessible online training and coaching tools, adults of all ages can actively improve and maintain their brain health over several years. The findings provide evidence that engaging in certain mental strategies and healthy habits tends to improve cognitive, emotional, and social well-being. This study points to a future where brain health care focuses on continued growth, rather than simply testing for memory decline in older adults.
Human lifespans have increased significantly over the past century, highlighting the need to match increased physical longevity with increased brain healthspan. A period of brain health refers to a period of life during which a person can maintain or improve their mental, emotional, and social functioning.
While many traditional medical approaches focus on detecting and treating brain diseases such as dementia after onset, growing evidence suggests that brain performance can be optimized early by taking proactive steps. This preventive perspective relies on neuroplasticity, the brain’s inherent ability to adapt, reorganize, and form new neural connections in response to learning and experience.
“For too long, we’ve operated on the outdated idea that we need to wait until something bad happens to our brains before doing anything,” says Sandra Bond Chapman, director of the Center for Brain Health and a distinguished professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. “This study reminds us that our brains are not defined by age, but by potential.”
Chapman pointed out that while medical advances have succeeded in extending human lifespans, it is equally important to maintain cognitive vitality as people age. “Humans are already living longer lives,” Chapman said. “We are now extending the period over which our brains continue to improve and breaking the trajectory of decline that often begins in our early 30s, because it is our brains that are able to grow year after year that guarantee our longevity.”
Historically, medical evaluations have focused on deficits, comparing older people to younger people and measuring the extent to which they have lost cognitive speed and memory. Such approaches can create a stigma against aging and limit treatment to those who already experience severe memory loss. To challenge this theory, a team of scientists designed a new way to measure and train overall brain function. They aimed to see if people could strengthen their brain health at any age by treating physical fitness like fitness, where regular exercise leads to visible results.
To investigate this, the research team launched the BrainHealth project, an ongoing longitudinal study that functions as an online clinical trial. The study sample included 3,966 adults between the ages of 19 and 94 from across the United States and more than 60 other countries. Participants accessed a secure online platform and completed a comprehensive assessment called the BrainHealth Index every six months for three years. Rather than being a diagnostic test, this metric serves as a personalized benchmark, allowing individuals to track their progress over time.
The BrainHealth Index measures three key components of daily life, starting with cognitive clarity. Cognitive clarity assesses a person’s readiness to reason through complex situations, form new ideas, and apply executive functions. Executive functions are advanced mental skills that help people plan, focus their attention, and juggle multiple tasks.
The index also provides a connectedness score that assesses an individual’s social health, sense of purpose, and relationships with others. The final element measured by this index is emotional balance. This factor assesses your mental health, mood, stress levels, and resilience during difficult times.
After taking the initial assessment, participants had access to self-paced microlearning modules. These short video lessons and activities only require 5-15 minutes each day. Microtraining focused on cognitive strategies such as how to eliminate distractions, integrate information, and avoid multitasking.
The platform also provided habits that users can practice, such as ensuring uninterrupted time for important tasks, managing stress, and improving sleep hygiene. Additionally, participants can also schedule short virtual coaching sessions every three months to discuss their scores and set personal goals. The authors recorded how often participants used the platform’s resources and categorized participants’ usage as low, moderate, or high. They then tracked how these usage levels affected participants’ BrainHealth Index scores over the three years of the study.
The study revealed a consistent pattern of upward increases in brain health across the sample. Participants showed significant improvements not only in their overall index scores, but also in specific areas such as cognitive clarity, emotional balance, and social connectedness. These improvements were observed across the board, regardless of participants’ starting scores. In fact, those who started the study with the lowest brain health scores showed the most significant improvement over time.
This data suggests that participants with poor initial performance had enormous capacity to learn new strategies and close the gap with higher-performing individuals. Even those who started with high scores continued to make visible growth over the approximately 1,000 days of the study, indicating that there is no known upper limit to how much they can improve. The level of engagement with the online platform had a significant impact on the extent of improvement. Participants classified as having high utilization experienced a significant change in their scores compared to participants with low or moderate utilization.
Interestingly, the majority of participants who started with low utilization chose to engage more intensely with the training modules after the first 6 months. As these individuals increased their daily activity on the platform, their brain health scores subsequently increased. This change provides evidence that active and consistent skill building directly impacts mental performance.
The study also highlights rebound effects among participants coping with major life stressors. The authors noted that individuals are leveraging new cognitive strategies to restore, maintain, and even improve brain health during difficult times. These stressful events include personal illness, unemployment, and caring for a loved one. This pattern suggests that mental resilience is trainable and responsive to proven tools.
Researchers found that demographic factors did not limit these positive results. Young and older people improved at similar rates, challenging the myth that positive brain health is only for older people. Men and women performed equally well, and educational background had only a small effect on results. This indicates that active brain health strategies tend to be universally applicable.
The authors believe that by learning these mental strategies, people can develop a sense of self-agency, or a sense of being in control of their own actions and well-being. “Every brain is unique, like a fingerprint, and has the potential for growth,” says Lori Cook, director of clinical research at the Brain Health Center. “By moving away from one-size-fits-all solutions, we are giving people a personalized blueprint and enabling government agencies to continue investing in brain health and performance.”
Although this study provides evidence of the benefits of online brain health training, it also has some limitations. The study was designed as a single-group trial, with no control group receiving a placebo or a separate control group receiving no training. Because all participants had access to the tool, the authors were unable to make a direct comparison to a group that received no training. However, a previous small trial by the same team used an active control group, suggesting that these improvements go beyond simple practice effects.
Another limitation involves the diversity of the study sample. Most participants were highly educated, with less than 15 percent having a college degree or less. This lack of demographic diversity means that the findings may not fully apply to populations with different educational or socio-economic backgrounds. Additionally, the online and self-guided nature of the study resulted in some participants dropping out over the 3-year period. This is a common challenge in long-term Internet-based health programs.
Future studies should recruit more diverse groups of participants to ensure that these strategies work equally well for everyone. Scientists are also updating the platform to collect more objective health data, such as detailed medical history as well as sleep and physical activity metrics from wearable devices. By combining self-report measurements with biological markers and brain imaging, the researchers hope to better understand the physical changes that occur in the brain when people engage in these habits.
The study, “Measuring and increasing brain health across adulthood: A public health imperative,” was authored by Lori G. Cook, Jeffrey S. Spence, Zhengsi Chang, Erin E. Venza, Aaron Tail, Ian H. Robertson, Mark D’Esposito, Geoffrey SF Ling, Jane G. Wigginton, and Sandra Bond Chapman.
