Bilingualism: Key to delaying dementia?

saludifyBy Danielle Restuccia, Saludify

If you speak more than one language, here’s some good news: you’re protecting yourself against dementia.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, recently showed that among people with dementia, those who were bilingual tended to develop the condition later in life. They conducted the study in Hyderabad, India, among an immigrant population that included patients from a range of educational backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses.

The study, published in the Neurology journal, builds on earlier research suggesting the benefits of bilingualism.

4-year delay for bilingual individuals

According to the study, bilingual patients spend an average of four more years with full control of their mental faculties. While the average age of dementia onset among monolingual patients in the study was 61.1, for those that spoke two or more languages, the average age of onset was 65.6.

One of the study’s key findings was that bilingualism is beneficial regardless of education: patients who spoke more than one language, no matter their level of schooling, had a better chance of staving off dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Even illiterate patients reaped the benefits of speaking a second language.

On the other hand, the study showed that speaking more than two languages made no significant difference in developing dementia. Researchers interviewed by Medpage Today said that this might be because bilingualism already calls on all of the brain’s “code switching” faculties; multilingualism simply maintains that level of cognitive effort.

Language switching and cognitive reserve

Researcher Dr. Thomas Bak, in talking to the NY Daily News, noted that switching between languages requires that a person “practice a kind of brain gymnastics.”

Specifically, Medpage Today reported that speaking one language while suppressing another requires a person’s brain to use both the executive function, meaning connecting past experience to a present situation, and the attention function.

Researchers were particularly excited to see the seeming connection between that mental exercise and cognitive reserve.

Dr. Stephen Rao, of the Cleveland Clinic, describes cognitive reserve as “the ability of the brain to keep functioning normally despite significant disease or injury.” Because speaking two languages calls on so many different areas of your brain, it increases its resiliency, in a sense, making you better able to resist dementia. Rao added that education and “higher order cognitive abilities” have also been shown to strengthen cognitive reserve.

As mentioned, however, bilingualism also provides advantages to people who don’t have any formal education, setting it apart from those other factors. Bak noted that 14 percent of the study participants were illiterate.

One question that remains is whether bilingualism’s connection to dementia depends on age: can you still build cognitive reserve if you learn a second language at age 50? According to Medpage Today, other studies have shown that challenging mental activities can provide cognitive benefits both before and after a person develops dementia. However, whether that’s true for language learning is yet to be seen.

While there’s still more research to be done, it’s clear that exercising your brain can only help you later in life. If learning a second language isn’t on your list of to-dos, maybe it should be!

This article was originally published in Saludify.

Danielle Restuccia is a freelance writer for several national publications. Her work extends from fitness and education topics to marketing material. She also coaches high school soccer and previously taught high school English.

[Photo by GollyGforce]

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