Impact of the Baltimore Experience Corps Trial on cortical and hippocampal volumes

Introduction There is a substantial interest in identifying interventions that can protect and buffer older adults from atrophy in the cortex and particularly, the hippocampus, a region important to memory. We report the 2-year effects of a randomized controlled trial of an intergenerational social health promotion program on older men's and women's brain volumes. Methods The Brain Health Study simultaneously enrolled, evaluated, and randomized 111 men and women (58 interventions; 53 controls) within the Baltimore Experience Corps Trial to evaluate the intervention impact on biomarkers of brain health at baseline and annual follow-ups during the 2-year trial exposure. Results Intention-to-treat analyses on cortical and hippocampal volumes for full and sex-stratified samples revealed program-specific increases in volumes that reached significance in men only (P's ≤.04). Although men in the control arm exhibited age-related declines for 2 years, men in the Experience Corps arm showed a 0.7% to 1.6% increase in brain volumes. Women also exhibited modest intervention-specific gains of 0.3% to 0.54% by the second year of exposure that contrasted with declines of about 1% among women in the control group. Discussion These findings showed that purposeful activity embedded within a social health promotion program halted and, in men, reversed declines in brain volume in regions vulnerable to dementia. Clinical Trial Registration: NCT0038.