SAN FRANCISCO — As communities worldwide mark World Alzheimer’s Day, Posit Science, the creator of BrainHQ brain exercises and assessments, issued a global call to action: Shift the conversation from increasing awareness to immediate, science-backed prevention. With global dementia cases projected to rise sharply over the next two decades, BrainHQ urges the medical community and the public to look past general advice to “challenge your mind” and to adopt clinically proven neuroplasticity-based training, capable of altering the trajectory of cognitive performance.
“Awareness is a vital first step, but awareness alone cannot improve the brain’s biology and performance,” said Dr. Henry Mahncke, a leading brain plasticity researcher and CEO of Posit Science. “This World Alzheimer’s Day, let’s stop giving general and ineffective advice to ‘stay mentally active’ and shift to recommending specific actions shown in prospective randomized controlled trials to improve the brain’s health and to maintain or improve cognitive performance (often against control activities that keep people mentally active, but deliver no measurable benefit).”
“We should also stop giving people a list of nine or more ‘lifestyle changes’ to make,” Dr. Mahncke continued. “It’s asking too much and it’s completely unjustified where the changes have not been shown in isolation to have a significant effect in a prospective randomized controlled trial.”
Dr. Mahncke referenced a meta-analysis on a large number of suggested lifestyle interventions reported in the British medical Journal Lancet in 2025, which found: “When compared with active control, only physical exercise and cognitive training combined, and cognitive training alone, revealed significant improvement of global cognition.”
Dr. Mahncke said that since last year’s World Alzheimer’s Day, the increase in evidence for plasticity-based brain training has been truly astounding, citing: the INHANCE neuroimaging study which made history as BrainHQ exercises became the first intervention ever shown to cause persistent upregulation in the production of acetylcholine (the “pay attention” brain chemical known to decline with age and plummet with dementia); the 2800-person ACTIVE Study, which showed a 25 percent lower incidence of Alzheimer’s from very little training (less than 24 hours in total, spread over the first three years of the 20-year study); and the ENACT Study which showed training lowered levels of a blood biomarker of beta amyloid (an identifier of Alzheimer’s).
“There’s certainly a lot of progress to celebrate in just the past year,” Dr. Mahncke added, “but we need to act on what the science is proving and let that direct our advice, not general marketing slogans that sound nice and offer no scientifically helpful direction.”
BrainHQ has shown benefits in more than 300 studies. Such benefits include gains in cognition (attention, speed, memory, decision-making), in quality of life (depressive symptoms, confidence and control, health-related quality of life) and in real-world activities (health outcomes, balance, driving, workplace activities). BrainHQ also has been shown to improve the health of the brain as an organ, including faster neural processing, increased hippocampal activation, neuromodulator upregulation, improvements in white matter integrity, enhanced functional connectivity, and protective maintenance of the default mode network. BrainHQ is used by leading health plans, by leading medical centers, clinics, and communities, and by elite athletes, the military, and other organizations focused on peak performance. Consumers can try a BrainHQ exercise for free daily at brainhq.com.