LONDON: If you are worried that your mental power will decline as you age, there’s some good news - a relatively brief flurry of brain exercises can improve your memory by a considerable period.

A team of international researchers has carried out a study and found that doing the right kind of brain exercises can slow down the mind’s deterioration by about a decade, The Daily Telegraph reported on Tuesday.

"Doing the properly designed cognitive activities can actually enhance abilities as you age," lead researcher Dr Elizabeth Zelinski of the University of Southern California Andrus Gerontology Centre was quoted as saying.

The researchers came to the conclusion after analysing a group of 65-plus people who exercised their mind with a brain revitalisation computer programme. Half of the more than 500 participants in the study completed up to 40 hours of the computer-based brain fitness programme. The other half completed up to 40 hours of a computer-based educational training programme.

"The group that relied on cranial calisthenics showed significantly superior improvements in standardised clinical measures of memory gains of approximately 10 years. The changes we saw in the experimental group were remarkable and significantly larger than the gains in the control group.

"From a researcher’s point of view, this was very impressive - people got better at the tasks trained, those improvements generalised to various standardised measures of memory, and people perceived improvements in their lives," Zelinski was quoted as saying. Earlier studies have shown that people who solve puzzles and jigsaws keep their brain agile.