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Updated: Apr 15, 2026
Investigations on Alterations of Hippocampal Circuit Function Following Mild Traumatic Brain Injury
Published on: November 19, 2012
Impact of the Baltimore Experience Corps Trial on cortical and hippocampal volumes
Michelle C Carlson1, Julie H Kuo2, Yi-Fang Chuang3
1Department of Mental Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA; Center on Aging and Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA; Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA.
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.
