Medical News Today (MNT) reports on a new study relating Internet use to resistance to dementia.(1) The report finds that from a study of more than 18,000 US adults age 50 and over, use of the internet for at least 30 minutes per day is associated with a 43% reduction in the risk of developing dementia.

The big caveat on this remarkable finding is that this is a statistical analysis, not a causal model. We don’t know how usage of the brain impedes the development of dementia, just that it seems to do it.

A second caveat is that perhaps half of dementia patients are never formally diagnosed with the disease.(2) Dementia can of course take a range of forms from very mild to severe, and a doctor may not even notice that a patient has a milder form.

On the other hand, the research is consistent with other findings…