Children who spend hours playing video games could be at higher risk of Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases in later life, experts warned.
Alarming research shows that those who play action games such as Grand Theft Auto and Call Of Duty use a different part of the brain to others when they have to navigate in real life.
There are fears this will lead to shrinkage of the hippocampus, part of the brain that is involved in memory forming, making a host of brain diseases more likely. The hippocampus is one of the first areas to be destroyed by Alzheimer’s.
It is estimated the average child will clock up nearly 10,000 hours playing video games by the time he or she reaches 21, and that, globally, three billion hours a week are spent in front of video screens.
Researchers asked men and women in their late teens and early 20s to play a game in which they had to find their way around a maze. This allowed them to compare the strategies of non-players and regular gamers – those who spent at least six hours a week playing action games which often involve navigating around a battlefield or a strange city.
Normally, young people are equally likely to use a ‘spatial’ navigation strategy, which involves the hippocampus, or a ‘response’ strategy, which engages a different area of the brain called the ‘caudate nucleus’. This was the case with those who didn’t play video games. The gamers, however, were twice as likely to plump for the response type of navigation. Previous studies have shown that people who use their caudate nucleus to find their way around have a smaller hippocampus.
Writing in the journal Proceedings Of The Royal Society B, the Canadian researchers said: ‘Reduced grey matter in the hippocampus has been associated with an increased risk of numerous neurological and psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and Alzheimer’s disease.’
University of Montreal researcher Dr Gregory West said that while action video games may have benefits, such as improving reaction times, they may also harm the brain. He said: ‘For over a decade now, research has demonstrated that action video game players display more efficient visual attention abilities. Our study confirms this.
‘We, however, also found that action video game players use navigation strategies that rely on the caudate nucleus to a much greater degree than non-players.
‘Past research has shown that people who rely on caudate nucleus-dependent strategies have lower grey matter and functional brain activity in the hippocampus.
‘This means that people who play a lot of action video games could have reduced hippocampal integrity, which is associated with increased risk for neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.’
But Alzheimer’s experts were cautious about the study.
Tim Parry, from Alzheimer’s Research UK, said: ‘The risk factors for Alzheimer’s and other causes of dementia are varied and complex, but this study does not add Call Of Duty or Grand Theft Auto to that list. This study focused on a specific navigation task in young adults and did not look long-term, so we cannot draw conclusions.’
Daily Mail