Hospital Advises Games as Therapy

Uchida Hospital, located in Kyoto Japan, has taken the unusual step of making handheld game consoles available to its patients who suffer from dementia. Dementia is the medical term for individuals who have lost their cognitive functions such as making decisions, sound judgments, memory retention, verbal communication skills or normal thinking and reasoning processes. The degree of dementia varies but often is often associated with the elderly. The report, filed by Associated Press, said that the hospital let their dementia patients check out Nintendo DS consoles and then recommended these patients buying an edition of one of the Brain Training series of games. The Brain Training games have become a phenomenal hit in Japan, with over 3 million copies sold. The games have a variety of mind exercises that offer simple math problems, quizzes, puzzles, literature, and other mental activities. The U.S. counterpart will be released in April 2006 under the name Brain Age. Does playing the game work on improving the patient™s condition at the hospital? While it is still too early to say, there have been studies which seem to indicate that individuals with actively use their minds, are more likely to retain their cognitive facilities then those who don™t.