Ten-year project to help prevent dementia uses 1940s study to track mental development over the decades

A BICYCLE is propped up in the corner, the walls are lined with old books and there's a large oil portrait of a serious-looking, learned chap on the wall. So far, so very much what you'd expect in a professor's study.

But while Ian Deary's job is partly carried out with one foot in the past, his quadruple-screened computer in the corner shows just where his research is going – into the future. And he's hoping to take us all there with him, with our mental faculties very much intact.

Deary is the lead man in the 13.5 million ten-year Disconnected Mind project, a collaboration between Edinburgh University and the Western General Hospital, which aims to find a way to get our brains and minds to age more healthily.

It is, as project funder Help the Aged says, "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to improve the lives of older people by unlocking the causes of age-related mental decline".

It sounds like the holy grail of modern medicine. The brain, after all, is one of the least understood organs in the body, and given that the population is getting older, the numbers of people set to suffer mental illnesses such as dementia and Alzheimer's are only expected to rise.

Around 800,000 people in the UK are currently diagnosed with severe cognitive decline, and this figure is set to double in the next 20 years, leaving a generation of pensioners who find themselves unable to carry out everyday activities and live independently.

And Edinburgh, as it has proved through the ages, is at the centre of the ground-breaking research.

Deary, 55, is professor of differential psychology at Edinburgh University and more importantly the director of the Medical Research Council Centre for Cognitive Ageing, which is where the hard work happens. And it was thanks to his unearthing of a set of IQ tests from the 1940s that the project was even able to happen.

The tests, by the Scottish Council for Research in Edinburgh, were conducted to assess the mental health of the nation. The results were compiled, published, and then left to gather dust in the SCRE's vaults. It was Deary and Lawrence Whalley, professor of mental health at Aberdeen University, who discovered their existence thanks to a reference in an academic journal.

"We found the answers from the intelligence test that 70,000 Scottish 11-year-olds took in 1947," he says. "It was the Scottish Mental Survey, which was devised by Professor Godfrey Thomson," he points to the portrait on the wall.

"It was the biggest study of its kind ever taken and we realised that if we could trace the people who had taken it and have them re-sit it, we could see how their mental abilities had changed as they aged.

"It is a unique set of data and we aim to find the risk factors for healthy mental ageing and to see what changes take place in the brain due to ageing."

Deary is keen to stress that his team's research is about prevention rather than finding a cure for dementia. He doesn't want to raise false hopes.

"We managed to trace 1,091 of the people who sat the test in Lothian and that cohort began sitting a range of tests between 2004 and 2007, including the original test again. There were also physical and medical tests.

"Now we've re-tested around 850 of them three years on, so the average age is 73, and this time we've also carried out an MRI scan of their brains. And in a few weeks' time that will be the end of the second wave.

"So we will now have much data to compare, and try to trace the mental development of the individuals at a time when significant changes begin to occur. We can gauge the influence of lifestyle, diet and physical activity on cognitive abilities. Then we will begin the process all over again."

Deary, along with John Starr, consultant geriatrician at the Western General, is exploring not the little grey cells, but the white matter of the brain, and what happens when it is impaired. Furthermore, they want to know why it alters differently in different people.

The tests involve looking at the volunteers' blood pressure and blood flow to the brain, but also having them answer questionnaires, calculating their response times and reasoning skills, and observing how they organise information.

Indications so far show that the IQ level of people who smoked for most of their adult life dropped by a few per cent. Mental ability was also affected by how fit a person was, with less activity linked to a decline.

"The better the connections in the brain the better we can preserve our thinking as we grow older. So we are looking at demographic factors, lifestyle, biological, genetic and medical factors.

"The smoking or not does sound obvious as part of general health, that if you are thinking about it you would choose not to smoke, but what direction is the process? Is it that people with high thinking skills don't smoke, or that people who don't smoke preserve better thinking skills? Normally that's hard to pinpoint, but as we're able to track cognitive ability because of the original IQ tests from the age of 11, we can sort out the way it works to some extent. And so far smoking does have a negative effect."

One of the project's biggest supporters is actor Simon Callow, right, who visited Professor Deary and his team to see their work firsthand, as his mother had suffered from Alzheimer's.

He said: "I was able to spend a day with Deary and his team of exceptional scientists. The enthusiasm was palpable: even people studying the minutest phenomena, painstakingly sifting evidence, were clearly inspired by the prospect of coming to terms with a scourge that is no respecter of ability, upbringing or experience."

Deary says: "He was very interested in our work. What was amazing, though, was he organised an event where a number of well-known actors read the words of people in various stages of decline. It was very moving.

He adds: "People are extremely interested in keeping their mental abilities sharp in old age because they are living longer. People really value their thinking skills because it makes for a better quality of life and independence. We just hope that what we're doing will help more people keep their mental health as they age."

Help the Aged relies on donations to fund The Disconnected Mind. To donate or find out more visit disconnectedmind.org.uk or call 0207-239 1984