Of all the activities of neural plasticity, the benefits of multilingualism and language use are the most lasting. These take up most of the time within a day and also activate regions throughout the brain. TheAlzheimer's diseaseis the most common form of dementia and accounts for 60 to 70 percent of cases.
Benefits of multilingualism against dementia
Ellen Bialystok, Distinguished Research Professor at the York Institute of Psychology in the Faculty of Health, and her team tested the theory that bilingualism may increase cognitive reserve and thereby delay the age of onset of Alzheimer's symptoms in older patients. Their study is believed to be the first to examine these conversion times from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease in monolingual and bilingual patients.
Although the benefits of multilingualism delay the onset of symptoms, Bialystok says that once diagnosed, the decline of full-blown Alzheimer's disease occurs much more quickly in bilingual people than in monolingual people because the disease is actually more severe.
“Imagine sandbags designed to prevent a river from overflowing. At some point the river will win,” says Bialystok. “Cognitive reserve is holding back the tide and by the time they were diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment they already had significant pathology. However, there was no evidence of this because they were able to function due to cognitive reserve. When they could no longer do that, the “sandbags” were completely washed out. “
Research results
In the study, researchers examined 158 patients who had mild cognitive impairment. For the research, they classified bilingual people with high cognitive reserve and monolingual people with low cognitive reserve.
Patients were matched for age, education, and cognitive level at the time of diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment. The researchers tracked their six-month interval scores in a memory clinic. In this way, they wanted to determine at what point the diagnosis changed from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease. The transition time for bilinguals was significantly faster than for monolinguals, who took 2.6 years to transition to Alzheimer's disease. This difference suggests that bilingual patients had more neuropathology at the time of diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment. Compared to monolinguals, they also had the same level of cognitive function.
These results add to a growing body of evidence. Above all, these show that bilinguals are more resilient than monolinguals when dealing with neurodegeneration. They operate at a higher level of functioning due to cognitive reserve. That means many of these people will be independent for longer, says Bialystok.
“Given the fact that there is no effectiveAlzheimer's treatmentor dementia, you can only hope that these people can live without losing connection to family and friends.”
This studyadds new evidence by showing that once a clinical threshold is crossed, decline occurs more quickly, presumably because more disease is already present in the brain.
