Summary: Language has been shown to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s illness by up to five years. A new research reveals that bilingual people with Alzheimer’s have larger brain, a crucial mental area for storage, compared to monolinguals.
This mental endurance aids in maintaining mental works even when there are Alzheimer ‘s-related adjustments. Although there is no language-specific head reserve, the findings suggest that language improves overall mental health as we get older.
Important Facts:
- Language difficulties Alzheimer’s beginning by up to five years.
- Linguistic individuals with Alzheimer’s have larger brain than monolinguals.
- Through language, mental resilience helps to maintain cognitive functions as we age.
Origin: Concordia University
Language has long been associated with mental advantages for older people. In contrast to multilingual parents, research shows that it can help delay the onset of Alzheimer’s illness by up to five years. One of the many lifestyle factors that may influence mental resilience as we get older is this.
In a new research published in the journal , Bilingualism: Language and Consciousness, Concordia experts use imaging methods to examine mental tenacity in regions of the brain linked to speech and aging.
When matched for age, schooling, mental performance, and memory, they discovered that the hippocampus in bilinguals with Alzheimer’s disease was considerably larger than that in multilingual individuals.
” There was greater mental problem in the brain, which is the key area in the brain for learning and memory and is greatly affected by Alzheimer’s”, says the study’s lead author, PhD candidate , Kristina Coulter.
She co-wrote the study with , Natalie Phillips, a professor in the , Department of Psychology , and the Concordia University Research Chair ( Tier 1 ) in Sensory-Cognitive Health in Aging and Dementia.
The researchers compared the brain characteristics of monolingual and bilingual older adults who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, were cognitively normal, at risk of subjective cognitive decline or mild cognitive impairment, or were both.
They discovered that while there was evidence of hippocampal atrophy between monolingual and mildly cognitively ill people, there was no change in hippocampal volume in bilingual people across the continuum of Alzheimer’s development.
” The brain volume in the Alzheimer ‘s-related area was the same across the healthy older adults, the two risk states and the Alzheimer’s disease group in the bilingual participants”, says Coulter.
This suggests that bilingualism may have some kind of brain maintenance.
Localized resilience
The three components of brain resilience, which describes the brain’s capacity to deal with changes brought on by aging, are brain maintenance, brain reserve, and cognitive reserve.
The ability to maintain a brain’s form and function as it gets older is known as brain maintenance. Mental stimulation, such as bilingualism, along with a healthy diet, regular exercise, good sleep and good sensory health are believed to help protect the brain from deteriorating.
The size and structure of the brain are considered brain reserve. Because of the extra volume or capacity of brain matter, brains with greater reserve can continue to function normally even when they are damaged or weakened as a result of aging, including Alzheimer’s disease, which is a pathological condition.
Cognitive reserve describes the ability of a brain to use alternative pathways to maintain functionality even when it has been damaged or has experienced aging-related shrinkage.
Due to a lifetime of increasing cognitive flexibility, brains with greater cognitive reserve can use other parts of the brain than those typically associated with a specific function, such as language or memory.
Coulter notes that they did not find any bilingualism-associated brain reserve in the language-related areas of the brain or cognitive reserve in the Alzheimer ‘s-related areas of the brain.
Speaking more than one language is one of the many ways to be cognitively and socially engaged, which promotes brain health, Phillips claims.
This study was unique in that it examined the potential impact of bilingualism on brain structure across the spectrum of dementia risk, from cognitive normal to those who are more likely to have Alzheimer’s, to those who actually have the condition.
These Concordia researchers will examine whether multilinguality has a similar beneficial impact on brain networks in the future.
The researchers used data from the Comprehensive Assessment of Neurodegeneration and Dementia Study ( COMPASS-ND ) and the Consortium for the Early Identification of Alzheimer’s disease-Quebec ( CIMA-Q) for this study.
About this bilingualism and Alzheimer’s disease research news
Author: Patrick Lejtenyi
Source: Concordia University
Contact: Patrick Lejtenyi – Concordia University
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
” Bilinguals show evidence of brain maintenance in Alzheimer’s disease” by Kristina Coulter et al. Bilingualism, Language, and Cognition
Abstract
Bilinguals show evidence of brain maintenance in Alzheimer’s disease
We conducted brain and cognitive research on the cognitive reserve of the older adults who have Alzheimer’s disease ( AD ) from the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging and the Quebec Consortium for the Early Identification of Alzheimer’s Disease.
We used surface-based morphometry methods to measure cortical thickness and volume of language-related and AD-related brain regions. We did not observe evidence of brain reserve in language-related regions.
However, reduced hippocampal volume was observed for monolingual, but not bilingual, older adults with AD. Thus, it is believed that bilingualism can aid in brain maintenance in the context of AD.
